Wednesday, December 4, 2019

The Street Fighter - Sonny Chiba (1974) - Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong

While we are in the land of colour, here are a few shots from the beginning of The Street Fighter with Sonny Chiba. Like Sister Street Fighter, this film's premise engineers some flimsy excuse for starting in Hong Kong (I guess the world was still in the thrall of the previous year's Enter the Dragon and any sort of Hong Kong connection could feed off that) but then uses just a few small establishing shots followed by some studio scenes before high-tailing it back to Japan for the rest of the action.

The opening shot in Hong Kong is this one of the harbour looking over towards the Hong Kong Island waterfront. The tallest building at the time was the China Insurance Group Building. It's still around, on the corner of Connaught Road and Gilman Street, but it's now the short guy in the neighbourhood.

Sister Street Fighter (1974) used some pre-66 stock footage for its establishing shots, but this one can be dated at least after 1967 because that's when the China Insurance Group Building was opened. My knowledge, or lack of, means I can't really date it much better than that, although I believe extreme top right is Realty Gardens, the development that replaced the Mok Villa in 1971. So perhaps this footage was shot specifically for this film. Corrections welcome.

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