Hong Kong Holiday - Gloria Romero (1957) - Kai Tak Airfield

I have yet to delve the history of Pinoy cinema, but in my long on-going search for a copy of Hong Kong Honeymoon, starring Zaldy Zshornak, I came across a vintage Filipino cinema channel on Youtube that has some great old movies on it: Chiechay Channel. One of them is Hong Kong Holiday (you can tell by the title why I was drawn to it) which is a 1957-released (although apparently filmed in 1955) romantic comedy about a young Filipina, Ana (Gloria Romero), who returns home to Hong Kong from abroad and is immediately told by her overbearing father that he has arranged a marriage for her. She runs away and takes refuge with a local boat family in Aberdeen.

According to an online interview with Ms Romero that is linked in the film's wikipedia entry, the film was lensed in Hong Kong in one month during 1955 and the credits also mention at the end that both Yung Hwa and Wader Studios were used for the filming. Yung Hwa, for those not aware of local film history, were the original occupiers of the Hammer Hill studios later taken over by Cathay/MP&GI and then, ultimately, Golden Harvest. The studios had only just been taken over by Yung Hwa in 1955 and I believe only held it for a couple of years before the Cathay Organisation took it over.

I digress, the opening scenes were shot on the, then, old Kai Tak Airfield when it was being run from afew concrete buildings in the middle of what is now known as "Kai Tak North". Sadly, as you'll see from my screengrabs, the picture quality is not very good and there is the channel's rather large watermark on the top right that hinders some of the views. However, there are some decent locations to see despite this and, of course, I enjoy including films from as many foreign countries as possible.

If you want to see some better images of the Kai Tak Airfield as it was back then, then you can see similar views in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing and The Night my Number Came Up.