The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - View of Northern Kowloon

I've been waiting a while for the Celestial Shaw Youtube channel to upload this because it was one of the first "local" films I covered on my blog many years ago. Sadly, at the time I only had a VCD version and those things are not very good for decent screen captures. Also, it was at a time when I decided to concentrate on foreign movies only and so, regrettably in hindsight, the posts were deleted (along with some for Shaolin Temple I think).

Well, now that local films are becoming the bread and butter of the blog, it's nice to be able to look at this movie again and perhaps get some locations that I missed the first time around.

The film centres around Chen Guang (David Chiang) a humble taxi driver who is just an honest guy wanting to make some money so he can marry his girlfriend, Lai-ching (Lin Chen-chi). The film has a variety of small stories about the shenanigans that drivers and their passengers get up to, but the main story is how some criminals have decided to rob a bank and intend to kidnap Chen Guang and make him drive his taxi as their getaway vehicle.

The film starts with some scenic establishing shots of various points around the territory. This initial image is a view looking east across northern Kowloon's shanty villages. The "higher" rise on the far left is the old Shatin Pass Estate. The estate it still around but those old buildings have been replaced by taller ones. The other high rise on the right is the Manning Theatre building on Yuk Wah Street. Back then it was the tallest building, these days it's just a baby compared to how the area now looks. The squatter huts between them and the camera correspond to what is now largely the Chuk Yuen Estate and Ma Chai Hang.