Harry's Hong Kong - David Soul (1987) - Hotel Miramar, Tsim Sha Tsui

Harry spends a lot of his time visiting the Shing Po Night Club (聲寶夜總會). This looks like it was a real place but I haven't been able to locate where it was yet. However, the interior shots for the club were actually filmed at the Miramar Hotel inside the Miramar Theatre Restaurant. This should ring a bell with a few people because I did a post about it quite recently for the French film Banzaï.

As previously mentioned, the hotel was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for the Mira Place shopping mall. The hotel was rebranded to "The Mira" and opened up in a new venue on the opposite side of the road.

Harry's Hong Kong - David Soul (1987) - Former Victoria Barracks, Central

The first major scene in this show is when Harry pops along to visit his policeman friend who is overseeing a parade. I must admit I am not 100% sure about the location here because I cannot find a single image online to corroborate. My gut feeling is that these are part of the former barrack blocks that once lined the hillside inside Victoria Barracks (now Hong Kong Park).

There was a line of five blocks (named Blocks A through E) that once sat where Pacific Place mall now stands and they have been seen on this blog on a couple of occasions previously (Block A was used in Project A and Block D was seen in The Protector).

Unfortunately, finding good images of each of the blocks is difficult and I have yet to see ones of Block B and C so perhaps this is what we are looking at below? If anyone knows one way or the other then it would be great to get confirmation. There are still similar blocks to be found in Hong Kong but they all differ in terms of height, column type, arch shape etc and I can't find any to match the ones below. Perhaps Neil MacDonald will once again come to my rescue... :)

Harry's Hong Kong - David Soul (1987) - Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong

After a rather longer than anticipated break I am back with the start of a show I first was told about a few years ago by one of the staff who worked on it. In case you haven't seen it yet, my blog attracted the attention of Neil MacDonald who once worked for Salon films (at a rather crucial point in time) and he was good enough to answer a few questions and queries and supply the details of some of the productions that have been featured on here.

Anyway, despite there only being some poor quality versions available online to view (one of which is missing the first 5 mins), I decided to finally take a look a few weeks ago. It was meant to be a pilot for a series but was never taken up and now languishes in that limbo of being a TV movie no one cares about enough to give a proper release to. This is a shame because it's actually quite good. For anyone wishing to watch it for themselves, David Soul has the full version embedded on his own site (many thanks to Stephen Monticelli for giving me the heads up).

The story revolves around a private investigator, Harry Petros (David Soul), who appears to be a bit of an old, and rather successful, China hand. He runs his company out of a suite in the Peninsula Hotel and drives around in a Rolls Royce and it's quite clear that he has interests and contacts across a wide range of HK society. An old friend of Harry's turns up dead and the Triads are now after him to get back money that his friend had absconded with. It's got an ensemble cast including Soul's real life future wife, Julia Nickson (this is where they met), David Hemmings, Lisa Lu and the ubiquitous James Hong as a Triad leader. As mentioned by Neil in the link I provided above, Charles Wang also features in a brief role as the morgue attendant/pathologist and Neil as the covered cadaver.

The opening sequence features some harbour-centric views and sequences set to some dodgy theme music (dodgy because it has the required clipped staccato notes that we folks in the West will immediately identify as being "Chinese"...ish).