Thursday, December 10, 2015

Five Golden Dragons - Bob Cummings (1967) - Shaw Brothers Movietown, Sai Kung

Back in the 60's, Movietown was the biggest studio lot in HK and so it's no surprise that many a foreign production would use their facilities - even when Shaws weren't directly involved in production, they rented out their studio space to anyone willing to pay for it.

And so it is with the next scene where a cab driver is unceremoniously blown up by a bomb in his taxi. The explosion was quite big, so I guess doing it on a real HK street was not an option, so instead the famous Chinese town street on the Movietown back-lot served as a stand-in. To the average standard Shaw film fan the place should be immediately recognisable.


The same street seen in the top picture is also re-used later as a stand-in for somewhere else, but the tree in the background is a bit of a giveaway, so I guess they could easily have filmed both scenes at the same time.


There's also another scene when the cops are looking at a helicopter arriving, supposedly at the airport, when in fact they are at the back of the Shaw house. The metal yellow posts held up a roof structure between the Shaw house and a building behind it and the zig zag concrete stair at the back went up the hill onto the Chinese town set seen above.

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