Jaguar Lives - Joe Lewis (1978) - Aberdeen Harbour, Aberdeen

Aberdeen featuring extensively in the following scene as Lewis follows a local hood back to his hiding place and discovers how they are transporting drugs (hidden in buckets of fish). We get a thorough tour of the whole area starting with the waterfront right in front of the town, but there are some interesting sights.

Starting at the top of Brick Hill - I believe the film was made in the year that Ocean Park opened but I don't know if the cable car was a feature of the park at the time - we zoom down into the harbour area. In the second picture you can see the uprights of what was to become the Ap Lei Chau road bridge. This started construction in January 1977. The space at the back on Brick Hill is now occupied by the Canadian International School that was hitting the headlines last year with its various troubles. The bottom picture in this series shows the wide angle view with the former Police Station up on the hillside. We've seen this building in many a movie on this blog.

We catch a closer look at the former Police Station in the following screencap as the action moves down onto the water.

But following that we also see some other buildings that are still very much around. The buildings you see below are the ones that now front Wu Nam St. Of course in 1978 they were along the waterfront but that has since been reclaimed and become the main bus terminal as well as having the widened Aberdeen Praya Road running across the front (it's actually a highway for through traffic now).

You can see the same block on this Streetview grab, although from the side because trees along the road prevent me from getting a similar view. It's also useful to see how much has been reclaimed in front. So, to put some context there, the camera would probably have been somewhere around where the left hand carriageway of the highway now stands (bottom left of the picture).

Our next shot shows us looking over towards the Tai Pak. I'm not sure on the position of the Tai Pak in 1978 but I do know that the Jumbo had also been opened a couple of years before. Tai Pak is now part of Jumbo Kingdom and sits right next to the Jumbo over at the Shum Wan end of the harbour, but it's possible it was still at the Aberdeen end when this was filmed.

Speaking of the Jumbo, as we just were, it makes a surprise appearance but not at this part of the film. The following screencap is actually taken during a sequence when the action moves over to Macau and the film makers either intentionally or unwittingly stuck in the Jumbo footage as part of the montage. It's quite possible they mistook it for the Macau floating casino, which we will see in a later post.