The Man with the Golden Gun - RTHK Podcast

Announcement: Sadly, it appears that RTHK has felt the need to scrub most of its archive of the Hong Kong Heritage podcast, so the link below no longer points at the show. It's just one of the things we have to deal with in "new" Hong Kong where history is often seen as a threat.

However, something wonderful happened over on Gwulo. User hkspace_wl discovered that even though the front end of the RTHK website has been modified, the archives can still be accessed via a url. Sadly, the files cannot be listed (as far as I know) and the files have been given date names (ddmmyyyyy.mp3/m4a) without any textual description. So, in order to identify the one I did for this film, I had to go in and plug in afew different dates to find the correct archive. Luckily, the show was only ever broadcast at weekends, so it means the number of possibe dates is limited to then.

Anyway, bingo. I have since downloaded the file, converted it to .mp4 and uploaded it to Youtube for posterity. So a massive thanks to hkspace_wl for this absolute brilliant bit of help.

I shall leave the original post in as it was below for the time being.
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For those of you with an interest in James Bond, Annemarie Evans from RTHK's Hong Kong Heritage radio show recently asked me to contribute for a small segment on The Man with the Golden Gun as a sort of tribute to Roger Moore and his recent passing.

You can hear my dulcet tones on the podcast at the following link. The James Bond bit starts at around the 20 minute mark. The program also has a large archive of past shows and are well worth a listen for anyone remotely interested in Hong Kong heritage and culture.

https://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item.php?pid=164&eid=94417&lang=en-US

Many thanks to Annemarie for making me sound as though I actually know what I'm talking about...

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - Queen's Pier, Central

The Queen's Pier post from Bons Baisers de Hong Kong reminded me of another post I should have done several years ago but couldn't due to the poor quality of my screencaps (from an old VCD). In time I forgot about it so here it is now that I have some better quality screencaps. It's just the scene where Bond is taken onto the Police launch by Hip (Soon-Tek Oh) and their embarkation point is Queen's Pier along the Central harbour front.

These top two pictures show the car driving along Edinburgh Place in front of City Hall (you can see the ramp of the car park at the background of Pic 1) before turning into the pier area. The following pictures show the boat tied up at the dockside with the pier's recognisable cylindrical columns to one side and the two actors walking along it with the old Star Ferry pier in the background.

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - Chaplin in the casino

In another of my Chaplin spotting posts, here he is playing a gambler in the scene where the golden bullet handover takes place in the Macau Casino. Chaplin is the guy with the goatee (he still has the goatee even after all these years) sitting next to Maud Adams (to her left with the brown shirt).

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - R.M.S Queen Elizabeth, Hong Kong Harbour

When I did a locations thread for this film on Gwulo a while ago, this was by far the most interesting one - mainly because no one knew where it had finally sunk. Anyway, the guys on there got their resourceful hats on, as always and finally nailed it as being a part of the sea off Stonecutters Island that now sits under a bit of reclaimed land.

Of course everyone who has seen the film knows this location served as the covert HQ of Bond's boss in HK but, in reality, it was the old Queen Elizabeth ship that had been bought by the shipping magnate C.Y Tung (the father of HK's first lame duck Chief Executive - Tung Chee Hwa - the first of many I suspect). He bought the ship and was in the process of turning it into a floating university (called the S.S Seawise - C.Y's...geddit?) when it caught fire under mysterious circumstances in January 1972 and was burnt to the rusty hulk you see on film.

The main part of the superstructure that was above water was broken down and (I believe) was used to form some of the ground on which Chek Lap Kok airport now stands whereas the remaining part remained on the seabed until the area known as CT9 was built over it (CT stands for Container Terminal) at the SE tip of Tsing Yi island (the new Stonecutters Bridge virtually passes over the top of the area now).

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - HK->Macau Ferry, Sheung Wan

Well, seeing as I mentioned this place yesterday I figured we may as well post it up properly. Of course these days the huge Shun Tak Centre sits on top of the site and the view down Connaught Road is no longer open due to the construction of the flyover (which means these days you can only see Western Market with great difficulty).

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - Western Market, Sheung Wan

Yes, believe it or not Western Market has been on a James Bond film, albeit in the background of the scene when Bond arrives at the Macau <-> Hong Kong hydrofoil jetty. Look carefully in the background of these shots and you should recognise its distinctive patterned brickwork.

The only question I have is...did it have complete and utter crap in it back in 1974 too or was it put to a more worthwhile use?

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - Hanoi Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

An errata and, in fact, even a myth buster. The Man With the Golden Gun was one of the first films I covered on this blog. It has some great locations featured and unfortunately my initial posts utilised screencaps from a not-so-great-quality VCD.

I've updated them just recently with better quality DVD caps (catch them all here) and taken the opportunity to include a couple of places I missed the first time round. However, whilst going over this Bottoms Up post I noticed a glaring error in my location hunting - swayed as I was somewhat by the famous club's last location on Hankow Road.

On revisiting the screencaps I noticed that the club, in the film, wasn't on Hankow Road at all but actually on Hanoi Road. Now, whether the club entrance on film was the real club or a mock up is not really important (the interiors were filmed on stage back in the UK), what is clear is that we are looking at Hanoi Road and not Hankow as I had originally thought. Anyway, here is the post with some better quality screencaps.

The key to identifying this as Hanoi Road is the presence of the Kam Lung Company in the first shot, as well as one of the famous (now removed) trees that used to line the road.

Hanoi Road tree on the left

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - Dragon Garden & Villa, Castle Peak Road

This place is featured in a famous scene when Bond jumps over the wall of Hai-fat's residence and comes face to face with a naked swimmer who goes by the name of 'Chu-me'. I gather from the film plot that the location is supposed to be in Thailand (at least that's my interpretation of it) but of course the location is in HK (otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it) and still very much in-situ - thanks to the conservational efforts of the original owner's granddaughter - Cynthia Lee - and the helpful hard cold cash of one of her uncles (who managed to buy out the rest of the family).

So the location remains intact, and as long as Cynthia can keep coming up with some nice fundraising ideas it should be kept in fairly good nick (how about leasing it out the TV studios once in a while?). But one thing has changed and that is the front doors.

A while back the local District Council (I think it's Tsuen Wan District for this part of the world, but I could be wrong) needed to widen the well-used Castle Peak Road and the property lost a small part of the land that fronts the road. The original perimeter wall was moved back a few feet and these big red doors were put into storage.

The Man with the Golden Gun - Roger Moore (1974) - The Peninsula Hotel, Tsim Sha Tsui

James Bond, in the shape of the highly camp Roger Moore, came to HK in 1974 to film the first part of The Man With the Golden Gun. The original book was actually set in the Caribbean but the film makers decided to bring it over to Honkers and made good use of a few locations here and in Macau.

Bond follows Scaramanger's girlfriend from the Macau ferry pier in Sheung Wan over to the Peninsula and we get a few shots of the front (as seen above). The main thing to note is that several things have happened to the Peninsula forecourt in the last 40 years. First is the raising of the ground, so we no longer can see the steps up to the front door as seen above, this may or may not be related to the addition of the underground carpark (I think so) and of course another thing to notice is the flow of traffic has reversed from a clockwise direction to the current anti-clockwise one. But other than that (oh yeah, and the addition of the massive office block in the middle of the building - which we don't get to see on film anyway) the place is unchanged even down to the famous uniforms of the bellhops and the large ornamental lions that adorn the front entrance. Here are some snaps I took today. Actually, it looks as though they updated the entrance canopy as well. But anyway, take a look.