Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Former Fire Brigade Dock, Tsim Sha Tsui

Following on from the revelation regarding the Hankow Bund seen in The Sand Pebbles, an elusive location from Lord Jim has finally been revealed to me. This is the location of the Seaman's Home and Hospital where our main protagonist, Jim, is convalescing just before he accepts a position on the apparently doomed ship that he later abandons.

The first building can be seen below. It's the same building that can be seen on the left of this behind-the-scenes shot of The Sand Pebbles (although you can't see it on screen in that film). The grey building on the right being the same godown building that had "Hankow Godown" written on it for The Sand Pebbles. Anyway, the top two images below are of that white building. The third image appears to be the view from the same building looking out towards the waterfront. I suspect the trees and other greenery were put there simply for the benefit of the film seeing as this was essentially a working Govt dockyard.

The next images include the same two colonnaded buildings that can be seen on The Sand Pebbles. In the first two images it's the red brick building that can be seen on the far right of the screen shots I included in my earlier post (but here is one of those images). Again, I have no idea what it used to be and all trace of it has now gone.

In the final shot from the pier, we catch a glimpse of the final white building. Similarly style with lower floor colonnades, this one has thinner pillars on the upper floor with rattan blinds hanging in the openings.

Again, I have no idea what any of these buildings were, but given that this was a piece of Govt land that included a Naval yard and a torpedo depot then it's possible they were originally military in nature. If anyone can shed any light on them please feel free to comment.

According to this Gwulo image, it looks as though they had already been demolished by the late 1970's.

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - East Lamma Channel

Judging from the screen grabs I have, the sea-based scenes in Lord Jim were filmed all over the territory. The pictures below from quite early on (when Jim is on his first posting) were filmed just south of Hong Kong Island in the East Lamma Channel - it's the strip of water that separates Lamma Island from Hong Kong Island.

The prominent hill in the background is High West on Hong Kong Island. Look carefully just below it and you can see a small island, Magazine Island, that marks the western entrance of Aberdeen Harbour.

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Old Supreme Court Building, Central

It's difficult to know how to refer to this building these days. It's now officially the Court of Final Appeal but for many years was the home to the Legislative Council and that is how it stood when I arrived here to live ten years ago. However, before all that it was the Supreme Court and, I suppose, this is the role it plays in the film because the exterior was filmed for the marine court building where Jim's tribunal is taking place.

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Green Island, Victoria Harbour

Just as Jim and his equally yellow-bellied fellow crew are drifting into port after the storm where they abandoned ship, their small life craft bobs past Green Island at the western end of Hong Kong Island. It's recognisable for the lighthouse that still sits up there.

There are actually two lighthouses in the picture, the tall white one (completed 1905) and just to its right is the original Victorian structure built in the 1870's - all are now protected monuments.

Given Brooks' (Richard Brooks, the director) attempts to conceal modern elements from the film by obscuring them with passing junk sails, a non-Victorian element is acceptable here given that it is only out of era by about 4 years.

As an update to this post, I was passing Green Island the other day on the way back from lunch on Lamma and took a snap of the same area. It's not the same angle, but it's close enough.

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter, Yau Ma Tei

One of the great logistical problems of this film was keeping out of view all of the modern anachronisms that would ruin the Victorian era within which the film (and book) were set. I spoke to Chaplin Chang about this because he worked on this film as an Assistant Director and he told me Richard Brooks (the director) largely overcame this problem by having large number of fishing junks in the background - the intention being that the open sails of the junks could be placed in front of items that might otherwise ruin the shot.

To a large extent it does seem to have dealt with the problem, but you will notice in the film that it didn't work every time and in particular with the shot below looking west from Yau Ma Tei, the film makers decided the only thing to be done was to superimpose a large building at the back. My guess is perhaps it was done to obscure a modern warship docked over at Stonecutter Island?

The curved breakwater seen mid-picture is the old breakwater, now buried under several bouts of reclamation, that ended down next to the site where the Ferry Point Estate was located. You can see it on this picture here. The pointy hill behind the fake building is Sam Chi Heung on Tsing Yi island.

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Aberdeen Harbour, Aberdeen

Although filmed in HK during 1963, this film wasn't released until 1965. Based on the book by Joseph Conrad, it revolves around a disgraced sailor who tries to make amends on past decisions by helping a local tribe (perhaps supposed to be Malayan?...I haven't read the book so can't say for sure) fight a despotic General.

Aberdeen was actually one of the main stars of the film it seems because the same location is used several times to portray different places. At the beginning of the film it is supposed to be some anonymous port on the Indonesian island of Java, and then later, with a bit of jiggery pokery (some footage of a train superimposed in the background) it gets turned into the fictional post of Batu Kring from where Jim starts his epic up river mission.

In the top picture you can see the promontory that houses the seminary (look closely and you can just make out its roof) with Brick Hill in the background. The second picture shows both the Tai Pak and Sea palace moored in the middle of the harbour.

Later in the film we get the shot below - essentially taken from the same point as the second picture above, but without the zoom, but notice that there is a trail of smoke at the back. This is actually the superimposed train. From the looks of it everything front and middle is real but the far distant shoreline has been manipulated. It's quite convincing for a film shot so long ago, but the big giveaways of course are not only the still obvious floating restaurants in the middle of the harbour, but also the obvious presence of the old Police Station on the hill on the right. This is a great shot of the building because 1963 was obviously a time before any high rises had been built along that part of Aberdeen Praya Road. I'll do a separate post later where the film used those low rises with a closer angle.