Painted Faces - Sammo Hung (1988) - Tung Chi College, Kennedy Road

Our first film of 2022 is a film that I only recently saw, relatively speaking, seeing as it was made back in 1988 and I remember seeing clips of it during Jonathan Ross's now famous episode on Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show featuring Jackie Chan (filmed circa 1989).

Painted Faces (the Chinese name is 七小福 - chat siu fook - the name of Jackie Chan's former opera troupe, remember them?) supposedly details the daily life of the opera troupe beginning from when Jackie joins them in the early 1960s. Sammo Hung recreates his real life master, Yu Jim-yuen, and the savage beatings they all took when they did stuff wrong or were caught being naughty.

In reality, I believe the opera school was located in Yau Ma Tei in Kowloon but, for the film's setting, the production crew instead utilised an old disused building located in Wanchai.

The building's address was #6 Hau Fung Lane, although later the official address of the place appears to have been changed to 15a Kennedy Road. This weird discrepancy in locations is because it was one of several multi-storeyed buildings/houses that were constructed next to the steep and high terrace that supports Kennedy Road in the Wanchai mid-levels. All these buildings had entrances on Kennedy Road on their top floors (such as the two doors away - #15 - that appeared on this blog previously as a ballet school in Emmanuelle 2) as well as entrances on their ground floors in the steep area behind Queen's Road East. This building had a long staircase connected the top floor with Kennedy Road and I believe this is the one that can be seen in image 3 below.

According to the information on Gwulo.com, the building's former identity was as a Japanese-owned hotel called the "Chitose Hotel" before the war but was later taken over by Tung Chi College circa 1946. One of the comments provides some more recently taken pictures of the site before it was completely annihilated. That link shows it was also used for a film called Shogun & Little Kitchen (伙頭福星 1992) showing it was still around a few years after Painted Faces. In fact, if you keep scrolling on the link, you'll see the author also had already identified the location for Painted Faces as well (using much better Bluray screencaps as well) and so had beaten me to it by quite a few years. Sadly I wasn't aware of this when I started looking. Such is life.

I'm not sure when the building was demolished (historical captures made on Google Streetview in 2009 show it to have already gone) but the whole hillside was cleared to make way for the very controversial Hopewell Centre 2 project that is still dragging on over 10 years after it started. The sole survivor of this redevlopment process (because there was an public uproar when it was threatened) has, so far, been the nearby Nam Koo Terrace which can actually be seen in the background of one of the screencaps below.

This was the lower ground entrance to the college

The building viewed from Hau Fung Lane

Nam Koo Terrace can be seen in the background, left of frame

View of the terrace from the path that runs up from Ship Street

Looking down from the terrace. This path still exists, for now.