Operation Lipstick - Cheng Pei-pei (1967) - Clearwater Bay Road, Sai Kung

In a scene following the discovery of the statuette contains the microfilm, the main characters head back into town to inform the police. Their car is stopped at a junction between two roads.

This scene was filmed at the junction between Clearwater Bay Road and Hiram's Highway. This area now has multiple lanes criss-crossing each other but, as you can see, back in the mid-60s (and later) it was a simple T junction with Clearwater Bay Road heading off to the left and Hiram's Highway curving down the slope towards Sai Kung. It looks like there was a roundabout here but that was just a grass island separating the up and downhill lanes of Hiram's Highway.

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Ho Sheung Heung, Sheung Shui

I believe the final fight of this film - where the bandits attack the convoy after they have been cheated out of their hostage by Drunken Cat - was indeeed shot in Taiwan. The terrain is too expansive to be Hong Kong and the mountains are not those found in Hong Kong. The immediate previous scene though - where the prisoner exchange takes place on a desolate hilltop - was shot in Hong Kong.

I always have trouble finding a suitable name for this location. I usually refer to it simply as "Pak Shek Au", but I'm not sure how much of this area falls under that name. This particular location - the hilltop where the gang leader's prison crate is pushed backdown the hill - is closer to Ho Sheung Heung and I have previously called it "Roy's Hill" (in a since deleted post) because it can be seen in the background of the opening fight scene of Enter the Dragon that features Roy Chiao. This hill is just slightly east of a small cluster of houses called "Phoenix Garden" - once again the Google marker is snapping to nearby buildings, so here is the position is GoogleEarth so you can see where I am referring to. In Open Street Map it's called "Kidney Hill". 

In Come Drink With Me, we're seeing it from its summit (lower two images) as Drunken Cat pushes the cart backdown the hill towards the Governor's troops. At various points of this sequence we catch a glimpse of how unspoilt it once was. Now it's just full of junk, corregated steel fencing, small industrial facilities and much of the site formation work for the first phase of the so-called "Northern Metropolis". I've chosen a selection of images to highlight some of the views.

The west flank of Crest Hill is the back ground in these two images above

The round hillock is called Fung Kong Shan and Yueh Hwa is looking NW.

The distant, grey hills are in Tanglangshan Park in Shenzhen, China

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Shaw's Movietown, Clearwater Bay

It wouldn't be a Shaw movie if the Movietown set didn't appear at least a few times. In Come Drink With Me there are at least two recognisable (to me) spots in the old Movietown lot that have been used. The first is when we are initially introduced to Cheng Pei-pei's character, Golden Swallow. I'm not sure how convincing this disguise is given how stunning Cheng Pei-pei was, but in the shot below she is supposed to be disguised as a man, and this is how the bandits first encounter her. The location is the small bridge which can also be seen on this blog in The Million Eyes of Sumuru and Bons Baisers de Hongkong. It's interesting to note how the buildings surrounding it had changed from time to time.

The second location I want to show will be quite familar to regular readers because it is the large temple set that was used many times during the 1960s. In fact it has appeared at least twice on this blog as well because it was used in The Vengeance of Fu Manchu and The Million Eyes of Sumuru. In Come Drink With Me, this is the Buddhist temple operated by a corrupt Abbot who is in cahoots with the bandits. The bandits are using it as their hideout and have Golden Swallow's brother captive there.

In terms of its location on the Movietown site, the temple was constructed on the area that is now occupied by the Clearwater Bay ESF School site. You can see the site (lower left) was later (early 70s) turned into another Chinese town set, but it looks like the temple building was kept and incorporated into that new set.

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Kowloon Peak

I've been doing these IDs on an adhoc basis (normally I have them all lined up and ready to go) and hadn't realised so much was being filmed up around Kowloon Peak, so apologies for multiple posts featuring locations that are all quite close to each other.

The following image is still part of the opening caravan scene as the troops are making their way to wherever before being ambushed. In the image below you can see the start of the higher ridgeline that ends in Kowloon Peak proper. I believe this section is called "Elephant Hill".  The lack of a road and presence of only a path indicates this is a little further east of Fei Ngo Shan Road. There is a flat piece of ground where the path still contours the side of the hill. 

A few later images appear to show the area further around the bend (i.e. in the above image, off camera to the left) where the ambush scene was filmed. In those shots you can see the same part of the hill in the background. It's hard to pin an exact location here because this area is now quite overgrown as well as having an electricity pylon built on the site - no doubt the flatter topography was conducive to its construction.

Jade Faced Tiger (Chen Hung Lieh) on Kowloon Peak

This final image shows the view looking more or less due east from the same area. On the right, in the far distance, just behind the man halfway down the slope, is the distant peak of High Junk Peak in Clearwater Bay. All in all this scene involves some careful framing to exclude much of the modern development that would have been visible to the actors and crew.

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Fei Ngo Shan Road, Kowloon Peak

This image shows the cutting I have referred to previously, where the road crosses the ridge from one side to the other. The district boundary runs along the road here so the group are moving from Sai Kung District into Wong Tai Sin District. It wouldn't surprise me if King Hu just turned his camera around at this spot to film this earlier view. Once again, Google maps is messing with my marker locations so the one below is not where I placed the pin (click on the location at the bottom of the post). It's close enough but this is a recurring issue I have with Googlemap pins, especially so in more remote locales.

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Fei Ngo Shan Road, Kowloon Peak

Continuing on Kowloon Peak, the next shot clearly shows the view along the Kowloon ridgeline towards Beacon Hill in the distance. The two-pronged peak just before Beacon Hill is, of course, Lion Rock. You can see a very similar view here, in Heisser Hafen Hongkong. The group of actors would have been standing near the cutting where the road crosses from one side of the ridge to the other.

Come Drink With Me - Cheng Pei-pei (1966) - Tai Lo Au, Kowloon Peak

Welcome to one of my favourite Shaw films, the 1966 Wuxia classic that helped establish King Hu as one of the top directors of the genre as well as launching a 19 year old Cheng Pei-pei into film stardom. Wikipedia states that the film was shot in Taiwan and Shaw Brothers studios, but to my discerning eye I can also see several scenes were shot elsewhere around Hong Kong's then unspoilt and spectacular New Territories - these days the NT looks more like someone's scrapyard, unfortunately.

The plot revolves around a band of ruthless bandits who have taken the Governor's son captive and are holding him hostage in order to effect a prisoner exchange for their captive leader. The Governor dispatches his daughter, the Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), to capture the bandits, but despite her martial prowess she is eventually overwhelmed and is only able to avoid defeat with the help of the mysterious Drunken Cat (Yueh Hwa aka Elliot Ngok) - a beggar who has his own agenda but one that is closely linked to her success.

The opening scenes show a caravan of troops making its way through the hills before being ambushed by the bandits and the Governor's son being kidnapped. I've managed to identify some of these scenes as being in Hong Kong, starting with this initial shot of some seemingly empty hills.

The view in the image below is taken from Fei Ngo Shan Road looking approximately northeast. The small track running alongside that hill (Tung Yeung Shan) is now part of Stage 4 of the Wilson Trail. In the middle distance is a prominent hilltop that marks Buffalo Pass. There's a very close approximation of this view (though not exact) in this photo uploaded to GoogleEarth. So I think the camera was placed somewhere on the road where Fei Ngo Shan Road moves from the north (Sai Kung) side of the ridge, to the south (Kowloon).

The Magic Stone -Nancy Kwan (1966) - Town Island

A final post (for the time being at least) for The Magic Stone and it looks as though the boat wrecking scene was filmed on the north side of Town Island, in a small rocky bay looking towards an islet called Kwong Tau Pai (光頭排). The bay is south east facing and so open to the rolling waves that can come in during bad weather.

The Magic Stone - Nancy Kwan (1966) - Ninepin Islands

To be fair, a large portion of the footage in this film includes a lot of rather anonymous looking coastline, but I thought a brief glimpse of the Ninepin Islands was worth including. The boat was probably in the outer reaches of Port Shelter when this was taken, so not really that far from land. The Ninepins are 3 miles from the mainland of Hong Kong.

The Magic Stone - Nancy Kwan (1966) - Lung Shuen Wan Tin Hau Temple

Just up the shoreline from Tung A is the Lung Shuen Wan Tin Hau temple. This is where the wife goes to pray for her husband and discovers a lode stone that helps him and the crew to better navigate their way home.

The Magic Stone - Nancy Kwan (1966) - Tung A, High Island

The main village that features in this short film is called Tung A and is located on the east side of the bay. Many of these buildings are still around, although I haven't been out this way for more than 5 years or so. Google wont let me place the marker on anything other than a building (even when I do it snaps back when I publish), but luckily it has defaulted to one of the buildings in the top image. However, several bits of Tung A are used, including the next cluster to the south (bottom image) of this location which is about halfway to the main village site. It won't let me pin a marker there though (see location markers).

The Magic Stone - Nancy Kwan (1966) - Lung Shuen Wan, High Island

Next up is one of the films I have been trying to track down for several years, ever since I first read about it in Peter Moss' excellent autobiography No Babylon: A Hong Kong Scrapbook. In that book he describes visiting the set in a helicopter and ruining it all as the chopper's downdraft blew all the carefully arranged straw all over the place. The book also details how Nancy Kwan came to be involved in this little production despite already being a major international star: T.C Wang, head of Salon Films, was the person responsible for introducing Nancy to the producer of The World of Suzie Wong, therefore helping launch her career. So her role in this short was very much the repayment of a pesonal debt. Chaplin Chang, credited as the AD on this, also filled in some details for me and told me that T.C Wang was a very good friend of Nancy's father, Kwan Wing Hong.

Foreign film fans may or may not be aware that Salon Films - set up by T.C Wang - was the local production house that had an exlcusive license for Panavision in Hong Kong. This meant that if you came to Hong Kong and used Panavision equipment, you would have to pay Salon Films a license fee - regardless of whether or not the equipment was hired from them. After T.C Wang's death, his son Charles took over. You may recall many years ago I had a post featuring Neil MacDonald, who worked with Salon on many of the films featured on the blog. You can see that post here. Salon were involved in many of the foreign movie productions that I have covered over the years. This film is hard to categorise: is it a foreign production or a local one? Strictly speaking it could be either, but I've added it to the list of foreign/overseas productions because it was aimed at an overseas market.

After looking high and low for this film, it has suddenly popped up on the Government Record Services webpage. This makes sense because it was a Government production aimed at stimulating some tourism. Anyway, you can watch it yourself by going to this page and scrolling down to the "Videos" icon. The film is the longest of four shorts to view. No doubt this link will break at some point in the future so catch it while you can.

The premise is simple and is just a retelling of the myth of A-Mah Rock (aka 望夫石 Mong Fu Shek - looking for husband rock). Nancy plays the wife and Ling Yuen plays the fisherman husband. It's basically a silent movie with some narration.

The main filming took place in and around Lung Shuen Wan, the main bay on the south side of High Island. It has changed surprisingly little since 1966, but this is true of many remote places in Hong Kong. I'll get into specific locations in the next couple of posts - sadly this film isn't going to provide much for the blog due to the limited number of identifiable places - so to start off here are some general views of the bay area.

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - Lok Fu Park, Kowloon Tsai

It seems like I have been doing this film for ages because I started it when I was still in the UK back in April. 51 location posts makes it the highest number of posts for a single film in all the years I've been doing this blog (and there was a bunch I haven't been able to identify).

Anyway, following the defeat of the bad guys on the boat, the ending of the film sees the two spies meeting near the summit of Checkboard Hill. The intial shot shows the steep hillside of the Chinese Christian Cemetery on the opposite side of Junction Road. In the third image you can see the former radar installation that was located on the hill behind Wang Hsieh's head. It looks like they were filmed a little way down the slope from the circular turnaround (same place seen here) at the top of Fu On Street. The area is now part of Lok Fu park. The final image shows the buildings clustered around the layby next to the unction between Heng Lam Street and Junction Road looking much the same now as it did then. The only difference is the housing blocks between the actors and the background have all been redeveloped when the Lok Fu Estate was rebuilt.

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - Port Shelter, Sai Kung

After dealing with most of the gang at the ruins, Wang Yu and co head for the boss man and chase his boat across Port Shelter. There are some shots taken inside Port Shelter with Shelter Island in the background, but there is also a nice shot of the boats in the distance as they pass by Steep Island in Clearwater bay (top image). For that last shot the camera would have been placed in what is now the Tai hang Tun Kite Flying Area (a great place to pick up spare parts for your own kites because in very typical HK fashion, people just dump their kites in and around the bins at the end of the day).

Steep Island

Shelter Island on the left

Basalt Island in the background

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - Shaw Brothers Movietown

After Wang Yu runs up the hill he arrives, not at Monte Fort as you would expect but, at the backlot of Movietown in Clearwater Bay where he takes cover behind some (prop) ruins and is about to be gunned down by the gangsters. It wouldn't surpise me if these ruins were quickly knocked up just for this one particular scene given how adept the Shaw bros art department was. This area is largely taken up by the University of Science and Technology (HKUST) which has been slowly taking over the hills around Movietown since the 1990s.

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - St Paul's Church Facade, Macau

The car chase ends next to the ruins of St Pauls as Wang Yu jumps from the car and runs up the nearby hill to escape his pursuers.

Asia-Pol Secret Service - Wang Yu (1966) - Estrada de Dom Maria II, Macau

The car chase moves onto part of Macau's designated Grand Prix circuit along Estrada de Dom Maria II. The corner you can see in the foreground of image two is the start of turn 19 as the circuit rounds the far end of Dona Maria II Hill.