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.