Monday, July 29, 2019

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).

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