Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - View from the Hilton Hotel

Quite unexpected but welcome nonetheless is the following picture. No, this screen grab isn't from the film per se, but is a nice by-product of uploading photos to this Google blog.

In case you didn't know, Google has this funky new algorithm that goes through your photos looking for effects it can apply. It's already found a few of mine that it has automatically ,merged into panoramas etc.

The following picture, as you should know from my last post is taken from a room in the Hilton Hotel where Betty was supposedly staying during the story in Bruce Lee & I. Google took the three screen grabs I uploaded and simply removed Betty! - I think there are probably a few Bruce Lee fans around the world that wish they could do the same, though I'm not one of them.

Anyway the result is a nice clear view over to the buildings and out across the harbour and Betty being abducted by aliens.

Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Hilton Hotel, Central

Speaking of the Hilton Hotel, as we just were, here is a shot taken from it rather than of it. Betty is staying at a hotel in the film when she starts her liaison with Bruce. In reality she was staying at the Hyatt Regency over on Nathan Road in Kowloon, and Bruce was first introduced to her there, but in the film we have switched over to HK Island and she is shown staying at a nameless hotel, but as we can see from the film it is in fact the Hilton Hotel.

How do we know this? Well, looking out of her suite window we can see several buildings opposite: the yet-to-be-opened Furama Hotel, Hutchison House and what is now Bank of America tower.

The only building tall enough (because I am pretty sure this was not a back projected studio scene) to fit is the Hilton Hotel which was directly opposite the Furama.

Sadly, the Furama disappeared several years ago and was replaced by the AIG building that now stands in its place. Despite walking past it on several occasions I never went in to sample the revolving restaurant nor the bakery on the ground floor(?) that my wife says had the best cakes in HK :-)

Hutchison House (the shorter of the three) and BoA tower are still standing, for the time being.

Men of the Dragon - Jared Martin (1974) - Des Voeux Road, Central

Another blurry shot from Men of the Dragon as we see the car (in fact a Mercedes Taxi, which I am assured was a common sight in HK during the 70's) containing Katie Saylor drives past the Hilton Hotel and down towards the old Bank of China.

Of course the Hilton went in 1994 and was replaced by Cheung Kong Centre, but the old Bank of China building is still around thankfully and remains unchanged. The angle on Streetview isn't really a match so I have included an angle which shows the lattice stonework that we can see in the last screen grab above, and you can see the glass frontage of the Cheung Kong building where the Hilton Hotel used to stand.

This sequence was actually immediately following the previous post I did featuring the old Cricket Club pitch, which would have been off screen left in the above series of pictures.

Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Waterloo Road, Kowloon

Just before the car gets to Ede Road and Beacon Hill Road, we see him driving along Waterloo Road (okay, so I'm not doing these in the order I should be). First we see a shot through the windscreen that shows us Kilowatt Court.

A strange name for a place but I suspect either due to its proximity to the CLP HQ (that's China Light & Power, the Kadoorie owned monopoly utility company that provides the electricity to Kowloon and NT), or it may even have been developed by one of the Kadoorie companies. Either way, it's still around as you can see from the next Streetview picture.

Look past Kilowatt Court on both the film grab and Streetview picture and you will see the red brick tower of the Mary Knoll Convent School. This is one of the so-called 'Band 1' local schools that sees parents so desperate for their daughters (it's a Catholic girls school) to get into that they become Catholics just for the purpose of getting some extra points on their entry forms. I know, this goes on everywhere in the world but for some reason it seems more common here. There was even an instance a few months ago of a mother who got her son baptized so that he could get into the nearby LaSalle Catholic Primary school (yes, the one Brandon Lee attended) only to find out he had been baptized as a Protestant rather than Catholic!

Anyway, here is the quick shot of the school further on in the sequence, followed by the current Streetview.

Notice anything different? Well, the most obvious difference to me is the missing pine tree in the later picture. A few years ago this tree caused a bit of a local kerfuffle. It's a Norfolk Island Pine tree and, as you can see, had been in the school grounds for a considerable amount of time. This film was made in the mid-70's and there it is in all its glory.

The school decided in 2009 that it didn't want the tree any more and was going to cut it down, causing a huge uproar from students and public alike so the school backed down. Then about a year later it disappeared completely! It turns out that the school had authorised some 'drainage' works to be carried out that resulted in the roots of the tree being severed - in essence killing the tree. This despite the fact that as a declared monument, the school should have requested authority from the Govt to carry out any works on site (in case they damaged the school), which of course they hadn't.

Anyway, you can read a much better summary of the controversy on wikipedia here.

Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Beacon Hill Road, Kowloon

Well, it doesn't get any more real than this does it? Fake Bruce (Danny Lee) continues his journey up the slopes at the back of Kowloon as he heads towards Beverly Heights on Beacon Hill Road - the actual location of Lee's rather sad demise all those years ago. Not much has changed here as mentioned before. Many of these buildings are old for HK standards - Beverly Heights, where Ting Pei lived and where Bruce died (IMO of course - I subscribe to the theory that he was dead long before the ambulance arrived which is why it made no difference which hospital he was taken to...) was built in 1970 - but still sell for a ton of money due to the relatively large amount of space and ceiling size.

Here we see the car driving up the road.

The concrete slope is still there, as is the small staircase, the low wall and the little line of tree that comes diagonally down the slope. The building at the far end of the road (the Luso Apartments) are also still around as is that little hillock next to them. All that has changed really is that the local district council have added some tree saplings along the pavement.

Then as the car goes past the camera we get a glimpse of the corner at the top of the road and just beyond is the edge of Beverly Heights (the white building).

As you can see from the current Streetview, other than some tree growth this place has changed very little. And just in case there is any doubt as to where we are...the road sign is actually pretty much the only thing that has been removed :-)

Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Ede Road, Kowloon Tong

From the intro to the film when we see 'Bruce' (i.e. Danny Lee) driving in his Merc up to see Betty at her flat on Beacon Hill Road. In a surprise for the movie industry, the route we see on the way is pretty much as it should be in reality - and here the car goes up Ede Road on the way to Beacon Hill Road, passing Ede Terrace on the way - that's the retaining wall with the Chinese characters on that we can see in the screen grab below.

Despite quite a significant amount of development in this area in the past few years, much of it ongoing, both Ede Terrace and its neighbour, Orion Court (the gateway of which you can see up there past the terrace on the left) are still around and are still some of the more desirable places to live thanks to the huge amount of space inside the apartments - built when space in HK was less of an issue for property developers. Current Streetview below.

Men of the Dragon - Jared Martin (1974) - Palm Villa, Tai Tam

It wasn't just the various plot lines and characters that were pinched from Enter the Dragon, there is also a moment in Men of the Dragon when Martin and Ito go and see their wise master at his serene retreat in the countryside. The following will be more obvious to ETD fans but the fact is that the location used was none other than Palm Villa - the same place that doubled as Han's island training grounds in Enter the Dragon.

Appalling quality screen grabs aside, you can see the upper garden with the tree and its doorway that Bruce Lee walks out of at the end of Enter the Dragon (the bit when he gives the thumbs up sign to John Saxon). Look carefully and I would venture that the gold lion statue by the door is the same one seen in Enter (and coincidentally, it is standing in the very same place).

It's quite possible some of the props were left lying around after the completion of Enter the Dragon in 1973, and it's not too far beyond the realms of possibility that the Men of the Dragon guys filmed there not long after...anyway, I'll let you be the judge.

 Anyone who has read and understood my previous ramblings on this location (I do mumble quite frequently, so it's understandable if you didn't) will know that this tree (seen above) is the same tree that Lee magically leaps up into when he is about to be discovered by Han's guards on one of his night time recces in Enter, but that was pretty much all we saw of the place in that film. However, the arched stone doorway was seen quite a bit because it fronted the main fighting area. Here is a reminder where you can also see the gold dragon and all the black suits piling through the gap.

Sadly. that's all we get to see of the place in Men of the Dragon which is a big shame when you consider how iconic it has turned out to be.

Bruce Lee & I - Betty Ting Pei (1976) - Ma on Shan, New Territories

An absolutely ridiculous film on so many levels (but no more ridiculous than Game of Death) but contains some absolute nuggets in terms of film locations. One of the first is this shot of Ma On Shan from the old KCR train line on the opposite side of the Shatin Sea (now the Shing Mun River Channel). Have you ever wondered what Ma On Shan looked like before it became a 'new town'? Well, here it is.

Take a good long look at that pretty awesome view, it's been slightly squished by the lens of the camera, but it is quite easy to see that the mountain (Ma On Shan) which gave the name to the new town at the bottom of its slopes, is a fantastic sight to behold - especially in the 70's when clear days were the norm and not the exception.

Just to compare here is a quick grab from Streetview so you can see how much has changed.

Pretty amazing I would say, but not necessarily for the better, me thinks. I should just add that this Streetview grab was also taken about 100 metres closer as well due to all the reclamation that has also gone on on the west side (where we are looking from) as well. Plus, of course, when this film was made the KCR line - as it was known then and up until 2009 in fact - was still on a single track with diesel engines pulling the carriages.

Men of the Dragon - Jared Martin (1974) - HK Cricket Club, Central

Not many modern visitors, or even residents for that matter, realise that Chater Garden in Central (and the term 'garden' is applied in the liberal HK sense of the word here i.e. no grass, just concrete) was once actually a nice wide open cricket ground (with real grass!!) used by the HK Cricket Club. It's quite ironic that a large piece of grassy land should be need to be concreted over in order to get the name 'garden' bestowed on it, but I guess care of all things natural and green weren't (and still aren't) of great concern to those in Govt.

The club moved up to its current location at Wong Nai Chung Gap Road ('The Gap') above Wanchai when its lease on the ground was not renewed by the Govt and the 'Gap' site was offered as an alternative. It moved pretty much around the time this film was made (circa 1974/75) so it is quite possible that the producers of Men of the Dragon caught one of the last few games of cricket being played on this pitch.

Anyway, once again the grabs are not the greatest of quality but if you would like to see some better pictures of the ground, Gwulo.com has a decent selection here.

In the first picture below you can see Garden Road in the background where it hooks up with Queens Road Central. The building on the corner right there was the old Hilton Hotel - demolished around 1994 to make way for the Li Ka-shing monolith that is the Cheung Kong Centre. When I first visited HK back in 1995, I had just missed the hotel by a few months and the workers had started to do the pile driving for the new building.

As the camera pans from left to right across the pitch, the last screen grab shows the side of the old Bank of China, and look carefully you can see a little bit of the decoration that adorned the front of the Hilton. Chater Garden was officially opened in 1978 and these days seems to be a focal point for protest march gatherings. It's named for the road it sits next to, Chater Road, which is itself named after Sir Paul Chater who was a central figure in HK development. Some of the businesses he founded or helped found are still around including Hongkong Land (now controlled by Jardines) and Hongkong Electric.

Men of the Dragon - Jared Martin (1974) - Repulse Bay Hotel, Hong Kong

One of the nice surprises about the locations on this film is finding some footage of the old, original, Repulse Bay Hotel.

Sadly, this hotel was demolished in 1982 to make way for the not so great 'hole-in-the-middle' Repulse bay apartments. Later on a replica of the hotel was built as a mall - The Repulse Bay Arcade. I'd heard rumours it was a scaled down version of the older building, but someone involved in the rebuild commented (on Gwulo.com) that the front of the replica was built at the same scale.

Built in the 1920's, it saw many famous visitors over the years before becoming a focus of bitter fighting between allied defenders and Japanese invaders in December 1941. The Japanese renamed the hotel during their occupation and called it the "Midorigahama" until they surrendered in 1945. I also heard from Chaplin Chang that the hotel was popular with the cast and crew of Enter the Dragon during breaks from filming around the corner in Tai Tam Bay.