Love is a Many-Splendored Thing - William Holden (1955) - Kayamally Building, Queen's Road Central

Here's another oldie but forgotten about location that I was supposed to post years ago. This is the scene in the film where Suyin goes to meet her friend for coffee. The exterior of the coffee shop was filmed outside the Kayamally Building at what was 20-22 Queen's Road Central. You can just see the neighbouring Shell House in the background of the screen shots below.

For the interior scenes though, this was a studio set. The image through the cafe window was a back projection of some footage filmed on Queen's Road Central at the bottom of Pottinger Street. I've included the shot of that for reference.

The plot that these two buildings (Kayamally Bldg and Shell House) sat on now hosts the Central Tower building, that occupies the whole corner with Wyndham Street.

I have explained in my older posts that every single dialogue scene in this movie was shot on a sound stage. Not a single scene involving dialogue was shot on location. I'm not familiar enough with sound recording technology to know if this was because the technology (sync sound) didn't exist at the time, or whether the general noise in Hong Kong simply made it impossible to do cleanly (which is why many local films were still filmed this way well into the 80s and 90s). If you know, please feel free to comment.

You can just make out the sign for Shell House in the background.

Studio set with a back projection of Pottinger Street

Former Marine Police HQ - Now and Then

Here's a recent set of pictures I took at the Marine Police HQ. If I was a more diligent location documentarian I would be doing this for all the locations I post about but the problem is that I have over 3000 location posts on this blog so it's a bit overwhelming.

Anyway, here are some rough comparisons for a few locations around the former Marine Police HQ. It's now a boutique hotel that has gone through a variety of names, the current one being 'FWD House 1881'. I have no idea where the 1881 comes from because the building was built in 1884 but I suspect it may be due to the '4' bit being a bit unlucky (so many '4's are dropped in HK because it sounds similar to the word for 'death').

The first images are from Soldier of Fortune (1955). Below is the view looking west along the front of the building. The building was constructed on a hill and when the area was 'revitalised', the whole front of the hill, including where Ronald Chow and Michael Rennie are walking, was excavated to make room for shops. By the 80s, that whole area was covered in mature tree growth, all of it chopped down to make way for jewellery stores no one visits (and hence why many of the shops are now empty).

1955 v 2024

1955 v 2024

The image above of Michael Rennie was shot at the eastern end of the front facade. It looks as though there was a partition wall to the right of him that was removed at some point.

Next up are some relatively more recent film grabs, although they show the place before it was renovated and still had its white/light blue colour scheme. The image below is from Takeshi Miike's 2002 Dead or Alive: Final. The top image below shows (what were) the stables on the west side of the compound. I believe this building has since been converted into a Sushi/Sashimi restaurant.

And finally a location that was a bit harder to get a decent compariosn of because of the time ball machinery that has been reinstalled smack bang in the middle of the room. The old time ball tower, located at the front of the former Marine Police compound, had a metal ball on a spike that was dropped every day at 1pm so that ships in the harbour could calibrate their onboard clocks to allow more accurate calculation of longitude. This responsibility was later (1908) passed on to the tower at Blackhead Point/Signal Hill. As you can see from the screengrab, the mechanism for the time ball was absent in 2002, so I can only assume it was in storage somewhere and was reinstalled when the whole compound underwent its renovation and was reopened back in 2009.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing - William Holden (1955) - Queen's Road Central

I know I said I would post it later, but I thought I should do it while it was still fresh in my mind. During the pandemic I went through a bunch of my older movies and found a whole swathe of locations perviously missed the first time around. I already posted a couple of these bonus locations a while back (Pok Fu Lam Road and Po Shan Road)  but neglected to post this brief scene from the opening ambulance sequence of Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. It's part of the opening sequence that takes in several areas including Barker Road, and Queen's Road Central by Central Market. Anyway, following on from my last post for Yakuza on Foot my memory was jogged, so here we are.

These three images show the same stretch of Queen's Road Central, on the bend just before Hillier Street. The first image shows the reverse view of the Yakuza on Foot post, looking back down Queen's Road Central, towards the general direction of Wellington Street, from the bend under what is now Hollywood Terrace. In the lower images, the ambulance is tracked as it passes the camera. The opening of Hillier Street is on the right and the location of Central Theatre can just be seen on the extreme left of the frame - just a few pixels worth above the man carrying a rolled up rug. Unfortunately, it's difficult to include more images from this sequence because the camera tracking means much of the background is blurry.

The Night My Number Came Up - Michael Redgrave (1955) - Kai Tak Airfield footage

Just a quick post to show a brief video (<1 minute) that has been snipped from the longer 1955 movie The Night My Number Came Up starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Leslie Norman (Barry Norman's dad...and why not?). I know I have posted about this before, but it was just screen captures, this time it's the actual footage.Very cool.

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - Castle Peak Road, Lai Chi Kok

The final location for this film is a look along Castle Peak Road in Lai Chi Kok. The clue here is the HK Mary Sing Shun Factory Building that was located at #495. I'm quite familiar with this area so to see it so empty (compared to today) is quite astonishing and is a good reminder of how much HK has filled up (with people and buidings) since the war. The factory beyond beyond was the huge "HK Spinners Factory Building" that stretched from Tung Chau Street to Tai Nan Street (now Tai Nan West Street). The Sing Shun name lives on today because the same site is now occupied by the Sing Shun Factory Building.

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - Kowloon Hospital, Argyle Street

Following her accident, the wife is taken to Kowloon Hospital for surgery and we get to see a couple of the old buildings. The great thing with Kowloon Hospital is that many of these older blocks are still utilised and I believe this is Blocks A & C as viewed from the main entrance. You can almost repeat the same view today on GoogleEarth.

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - Telephone House, Cameron Road

I referred to another building in my last post and although the official address of the Telephone Building was Nathan Road, the entrance we see below is on Cameron Road. This is the office where Cheung Wood-yau supposedly works and there is an establishing sequence that pans up the front of the building from street level before we see him sitting inside his (studio set) office. The building had a distinctive art deco rooftop clocktower. It was demolished sometime in the 1970s to make way for the faux temple style HSBC building that now stands on the plot. The screen shots are in reverse order (because the sequence starts at ground level and pans up) but the Autostitch panorama below it probably does a better job. At the time of filming I believe the building contained a UK department store called "Whiteaways" but I'm not sure how many floors it occupied.

Panoramic image below courtesy of Autostitch

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

In a brief sequence we see the couple write a letter and then head to the local post box to post it. There's a big clue to the location of this post box in the background. The old building with the "Drugs" sign on it was located in an old block between Humphrey's Avenue and Cameron Road. The "Drugs" sign related to the A.S. Watson's Kowloon Dispensary that was based in the building at the time. This block was demolished circa 1958, just a few years after the film was made, and replaced by two separate buildings: Majestic House and Manson House. On the north side of Cameron Road is another, taller building we'll cover in the next post. The post box was most likely located on the corner of Nathan Road and Haiphong Road right in front of where the A1 exit for the MTR is. No doubt the exit is why it was removed because there's nothing there now. 

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - Jordan Road, Kwun Chung

This following image shows the view looking sort of northwest from Nathan Road area over towards the Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter in the background (with Stonecutter Island just peeping out at the back).

Given the height of the image this could only have been filmed from the top of the Shamrock Hotel, which in 1955 was officially the tallest building in Kowloon. I'm not particularly familiar with the 1955 version of Jordan Road, which is the main road running across the middle of the frame, but I think the brightly lit restaurant may have been the precursor to whatever now stands on the corner of Temple Street. Just behind it I can make out what looks to be a gas holder belonging to the former Jordan Road Gas Works.

We Owe It to Our Children - Cheung Wood-yau (1955) - View over Cheung Sha Wan

Next up is another one of Bruce Lee's childhood movies, We Owe It to Our Children (aka 兒女債).
It was re-released in HK sometime ago with Lee as top-billing ("Brucesploitation" lives on in modern HK) even though his screen time is probably less than two minutes. The main star is Cheung Wood-yau (yes, Chor Yuen's father) who plays an office worker and expectant father until his wife (Tsi Law-lin) is involved in a car accident and loses the baby and her ability to have another one. 

Most of the story revolves around the couple's accommodation where they live in a cubicle room (the precursor to modern day sub-divided flats and cage rooms - most definitely still a thing in modern Hong Kong) in close proximity to a variety of neighbours. But there is also the odd exterior location shot which makes this film a bit more interesting for people like me. Lee, in a very brief role, plays the wayward son of one of their neighbours who appears at the beginning and end of the film.

First up is a view across Cheung Sha Wan from upon Tai Po Road. It takes an expert eye to see the detail but it's a similar angle to this 1954 view that recently cropped upon Gwulo. The view below was taken slightly further to the west, but shows in blurry detail the old army camp in Sham Shui Po as well as some of the old housing stock along Shun Ning Road. Believe it or not, some of the buildings I can see in the foreground below are still around.

The last image shows the view further west still - around Hing Wah and Cheung Wah Streets - with some of the old boatyards in view from around that time. I'm not sure if any of the building seen in that image are still around though. The angle of the view indicates that this shot was most likely snapped from where the Carlton Hotel used to stand up on Tai Po Road - although I don't think it had been built yet when this film was made.

An Orphan's Tragedy - Bruce Lee (1955) - Tai Po KCR Station, Tai Po Kau

Continuing with some local films, here is one I actually posted about many years ago but removed when I decided to concentrate of foreign productions. Anyway, here it is again.

This is one of Bruce Lee's childhood movies (he was 14 when it was made) loosely based on Dickens' Great Expectations. Lee plays the childhood version of the main characters, whose father has been framed and wrongly convicted of a crime but escapes and then helps his son study to become a doctor. Apart from a rather anonymous hilltop where the young Frank (Bruce Lee) runs into his (unbeknownst to him) biological father - an impossible place to find even for me - there are two scenes filmed on location at the old Tai Po KCR station at Tai Po Kau. The first scene is when Frank (Bruce) departs to go to study medicine. The second scene is when Frank returns after his studies and has morphed into the rather drastically much older, Cheung Wood-yau (father of Chor Yuen in case you didn't know).

Yes, prior to electrification in 1983, there used to be two Tai Po KCR stations. One of them, Tai Po Market station, was decommissioned in 1983 and subsequently became the Hong Kong Railway Museum*. The other was originally called Tai Po station and was located next to the ferry pier at Tai Po Kau. This station was also decommisoned in 1983, but was also subsequently demolished and redeveloped into a KCR staff quarters called Trackside Villas.

The name of this latter station appears to have caused some confusion when it operated, and so the name of the station was later changed to Tai Po Kau to reflect the fact that it wasn't really in Tai Po town. The station was really located here because it was a dropping off point for the nearby ferry pier that provided ferry services all over Tolo Harbour - once a very convenient way for outlying villagers to access the market at Tai Po.

Anyway, in 1955, as you can see from the screen caps below, the station was still called just "Tai Po".

Train approaching from Shatin direction

The view towards the north/Tai Po proper

The little girl is a 7 year old Josephine Siao

*It was at the museum that I first discovered this film because a short clip from it - showing the two scenes I have mentioned - is included in a visual display inside the old station building. For those interested, I did actually venture over that way once and took some photos of where the station used to be. Click here.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing - William Holden (1955) - Pok Fu Lam Road, Kennedy Town

Another mystery solved thanks to help from the HK Mapping services online aerial photo catalogue. Actually, I already updated the Gwulo thread on this because David Bellis had started with the locations from this film way back in 2009. As you have noticed the past few posts are mainly films I covered years ago but had various places that simply eluded me and this one was no different. The main reason (as is often the case) is because the area it was filmed has changed significantly and that is why the old aerial photos have been really helpful.

The location is one of those seen during the ambulance driving sequence that starts after the opening credits have finished. The scene starts on Queen's Road Central and finishes at The Fairview but there are a few brief snippets of other locations in between and one of them is this place in the image below.

What this shows is an old bend in Pok Fu Lam Road that has since been redeveloped. The road has been straightened so that it cuts straight across the gap on the left of the screen but the bend does still exist and contains the Pok Fu Lam bus terminus. You can see the area after development courtesy of  this Foxbat post. The original path of the road leads around the back of the terminus past the petrol station.

Well, anyway, mystery solved. If you click on my very first link above it takes you to the comments on Gwulo and David has subsequently posted to fill in some of the details of the area.

Soldier of Fortune - Clark Gable (1955) - Cheung Sha Wan Boatyard, Kowloon

Despite me covering most of the locations from Soldier of Fortune some years ago (I did a post over on Gwulo back in 2009 which served as a sort of precursor to the establishment of this blog), there are still a couple of places that had defied pinpointing. One of the locations is a fairly innocuous street scene, but the other was a local boat yard to which Michael Rennie - in his role as the Marine Police Inspector, Merryweather - visits just prior to him getting stuck on board Hank Lee's adventure-bound fishing junk.

The scene is quite interesting because it looks like a real event going on (as opposed to being staged for the film) as a new boat is launched from its dry dock into the nearby water. The only problem I was having is the exact location as to where this may have been filmed.

It's taken a while but I have finally managed to pinpoint it to one of the local boatyards that operated along the pre-reclamation waterfront where Cheung Sha Wan becomes Lai Chi Kok. The key to the location was a familiar looking ridge line that I couldn't place until it dawned on me that I was looking at Lion Rock from the west.

Anyway, after consulting some aerial images from 1949 and 1959 it appears that the location for this particular local ship yard was at the very southern end of Hing Wah Street and this location tallies with the current location of Sham Shui Po Sports ground. The NW corner of the track to be precise.

Hugh farmer's Industrial History of Hong Kong has an article on ship breaking in the area and one of the images contains a similar angle of Lion Rock in the background, albeit slightly more south because it looks as though the ship building activities were along the south west facing Cheung Sha Wan waterfront area, whereas the ship breaking industry discussed in Hugh's article appears to have taken place along the south eastern facing section, essentially the space now occupied by Lai Chi Kok MTR station.

In the penultimate image above the actor, Michael Rennie (playing Merryweather), has moved his head and you can see Lion Rock poking out from behind the distant ridge line. The derrick in the background of the last shot is the landmark that can be discerned on aerial imagery and helped me pinpoint the location.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing - William Holden (1955) - 10 Po Shan Road, Midlevels

I (and many others) have been wondering where this particular building was located for several years. Ever since we first started looking at the movie locations on Gwulo back in 2009 this has been a location I have been itching to pinpoint but simply lacked the resources at the time. For those of you wondering which place in the film I am referring to, it is the building exterior used as the establishing shot for the dinner party that Suyin gets invited to and where she first meets Mark Elliot. Here is the reminder.

So you can see from the screen caps that the property appears to be built on a podium and the garden balustrade extends into the distance to the hill in the background. The driveway obviously reaches the podium via a slope but it's not clear how steep or curved it may be. The house itself has this very large and ornate stucco portico with columns and you can see behind the property part of a retaining wall where the hillside has been cut out to accommodate the building. The balustrade closest to the camera on the left is also angled away from the top of the drive.

I initially thought this might be one of the large mansions on Conduit Road close to the Fairview, but no matter how much I looked there was really nothing that quite fitted. Anyway, after a few weeks of sifting through image after image I finally found a photo on Gwulo that had a property on it that looked like a possible match. It didn't take long to find some aerial photos that confirmed the shape of the podium (the extended garden area, sloped driveway and angled balustrade etc) and 10 Po Shan Road was finally identified.

I have no idea whether or not this building's address was indeed #10 but seeing as #8 is next door and block 1 of the current building Po Shan Mansions includes #10 and #12 then I don't see it as too flimsy an assumption.

So what happened to the building? The truth is I won't know until I get my hands on the land deeds but from the aerial images the building was still around in 1959 but by 1963 had been removed, leaving only the podium. This makes sense because po Shan Mansions was completed in 1965 and the current building stands on the old podium with a few changes.

The building itself was replaced by Block B of Po Shan Mansions whereas Block A was built on what used to be the garden section. The old front driveway was filled with concrete and a new driveway constructed that led around the eastern end of the podium to the rear of the property. However, if you go and visit Po Shan Road you can see from the roadside that the old bricks that formed the slope of the original driveway are still visible...to the extent that you can see how they filled up the old driveway space with concrete. (if you have Google Chrome then you can view it here). Other than that the podium retains much of its old shape and you can even see the angle at the front that I mentioned above, where the driveway met the podium level.

Anyway, I'll leave you with this stitch of the screen caps to give you a better idea of how the place once looked.

The Night My Number Came Up - Michael Redgrave (1955) - Flying Over Cheung Chau

A quick last post from this film and it is a brief shot of the plane as it leaves for its journey to Japan and is flying over Cheung Chau - in the complete opposite to where it should be going! The land mass in the distance is the Chi Ma Wan peninsula of south Lantau island. Cheung Chau's busy bay can be seen lower right.

The Night My Number Came Up - Michael Redgrave (1955) - Kai Tak Airport - Part 3

This is the scene where the aeroplane makes its approach into Kai Tak along the Kowloon foothills and lands at runway 13. Even before Kai Tak was closed back in 1998, this approach was already impossible because most of the area over which the plane flies was redeveloped after the new runway opened in the late 1950's. I encourage you to go back and watch the clip posted earlier because the screen captures below really don't do the sequence any justice at all.

These first few images below show the plane flying past Beacon Hill in the background of image one. The exact location of the plane is over where the Lung Cheung Road was built near to where Beacon Hill Road reaches it by Beverly Heights and Elizabethan Court. The last image is around (and this is approximate) where today's Lion Rock Tunnel Road heads into the hillside.

The next set of screen capture reveals the location of the camera because the sandy path of ground in the lower part of the screen is the north end of what became known as Checkerboard Hill. The cluster of houses as the camera pans right is the Diamond Hill area. This was still a large squatter area at the time but of course is now full of high rise residential buildings. The creation of the new runway would shift the airport approach to the south side of Checkerboard Hill. The flat area in the foreground became Morse park.

Finally we get an on-board view of the landing at runway 13, you can see the runway number painted on the ground in the top two images. In the second and third images below you can vaguely make out some building on the left (north) of the runway. These should be the buildings that formed part of RAF Kai Tak. Incidentally, for a modern day comparison, this runway - or at least the first 350metres or so - was eventually turned into Tseuk Luk Street. If you look at the extreme bottom of the first image (apologies for the watermark) you can just make out the area where the road (now Choi Hung Road) crossed the end of the runway. At some point the runway was extended across the road and barriers had to be set up to prevent cars crossing as a plane was approaching.

A final quick glimpse of the plane as it completes its landing and comes to a stop with Lion Rock very obvious in the background.