Showing posts with label Mercury House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mercury House. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2022

La Fine Dell'innocenza - Annie Belle (1976) - Connaught Road, Central

After crossing the harbour, the pair are eventually stopped on Connaught Road next to the Hong Kong Club, and a naked Annie makes a run for Statue Square and plunges into the ornamental ponds there to try and escape the police. Note the old Electra/Mercury House on the left and the old Hong Kong Club building. CCB Tower now stands on that site.

Electra/Mercury House on the left, next to it is the old Hong Kong Club
I'll never look at these pools in the same way again

Saturday, June 10, 2017

A Queen's Ransom - George Lazenby (1976) - City Hall, Central

Here's a few shots of the area round City Hall. The first shot shows the camera looking west along Connaught Road with the City Hall building on the right hand side. On the extreme left is the lower floors of the Furama Hotel (now replaced with AIA Central building) followed by what was once the home of Cable and Wireless - Mercury House. I'm not sure what year it was demolished but it has since been replaced by the short-lived Ritz Carlton (seen here) and then again by the current building, CCB Tower. Next along is the recognisable form of the old Hong Kong Club building with the Mandarin Oriental Hotel just beyond on the other side of the square.


There is also some archive footage of the Queen visiting City Hall from the harbour side of the building (i.e. what would be off camera to the right in the top picture). 

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Day of the Panther - Eddie Stazak (1988) - Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong

This is the clip that confirms that Trenchard-Smith cheated a bit on the HK footage. The film was made in 1988, but the following screencaps show us this footage was made several years previously.


We have the usual suspects to look at including the Furama Hotel, City Hall, the Mandarin Oriental, Jardine (then Connaught) House. But look closely and you can see some stuff that really shouldn't have been there in 1988. The most obvious is the old HSBC Building (see second pic above the "Exe" of "Executive Producers". This building was demolished in 1984 and replaced by the current Foster designed iconic (but ugly) structure. But actually, there is a building that was demolished even earlier, it's the Hong Kong Club - you can just see it on the far left of the second picture. This place was demolished in 1981. Sadly, my knowledge can't place it any earlier than that, but feel free to comment if you can see a building in there that was knocked down even earlier.

So, I wonder if this was footage that Trenchard-Smith still had from his earlier forays into filming in Hong Kong? It certainly wasn't filmed for the purpose of this movie.