Cleopatra heads over to a working dock area where she has been given a tip off about some illicit strawberry jam. It turns out the fake money, or at least the Hong Kong dollars part of it, is being smuggled into Hong Kong via jam jars. She goes to meet her informant at the waterside. A couple of the background buildings, sitting along Connaught Road, are still around so it allows us to see that this particular stretch of waterfront was located between Queen's Street and Sutherland Street. The exact location of the truck would be somewhere around the southern edge of the soccer pitch at the east end of Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park today.
Next up is a Filipino/Singaporean co-production that filmed in the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong. Although the Hong Kong scenes are brief, at least the lead actor, Marrie Lee, was actually here rather than the film just being a bunch of stock footage establishing shots.
The premise is that Singapore's top female agent, Cleopatra Wong, is called back from her holiday in Manila to deal with a counterfeit money organisation that seeks to release forged money into the economies of the various ASEAN members. So she infiltrates the gang to find their secrets before heading off to Hong Kong and then finally back to the Philippines for the film's finale involving men dressed as nuns sporting assault rifles.
The opening Hong Kong scene is the usual view of the harbour from the Peak area, panning across Wanchai. Note the top of the old AIA building in the first image. This has recently been demolished I understand (remember, I have been stuck in the UK for almost 6 months so haven't had a chance to see what is still standing since the pandemic struck).
Or for those who would like to see all these images stitched together, here is a reasonable attempt courtesy of Autostitch.
I think the final image for this film will have to be this nice colour footage of Queen's Road East. The camera pans from left to right at the junction with Wanchai Road. If you look carefully you can just about see one of the streamline moderne "fins" of the Art Deco Wanchai Market building at the very right of the last frame. The market area, surrounded by those glorious painted wall adverts, is where block 2 of "The Zenith" now stands.
In the film, Richard Basehart's character is friends with a family who supposedly save him when he was shot down during the war, and so he has become and adopted "big brother". The family seems to be well to do and live in a rather large property somewhere. The establishing shot for their home is a rather grand looking place with some art deco styling and two Chinese characters embedded into the roof. This one took a while to locate because these screenshots were the only clue I had and thankfully I recognised Grandview Mansions on the hilltop in the background.
Anyway, it runs out that this property was located at #28 Tai Hang Road. The site is now occupied by a mid-60s era mid rise residential block called "Kan Oke House". As I sometimes do when I find something interesting on film, I posted the house on Gwulo.com and a local historian filled in the background details (and at the same time was obviously in awe of my location detective skills).
So, the house was built by a local merchant called Kwok Hin Wang in 1928 and the two characters in the roof, that you can't really make out in these screencaps (I believe there is a HD bluray release though, so perhaps that would be clearer) are 勤屋. In Cantonese this is pronounced as "kan uk" which basically translates to industrious/hardworking house. So the current building name, Kan Oke, is (and this happens a lot in Hong Kong) a name homage to the former occupant of the site.
Looking at the aerial images of the area, there are none available between 1960 and 1962, and by the time 1963 comes around the house had already been demolished and the plot was sitting empty. It was still empty in 1964 and by 1966 Kan Oke House had been built.
The first image obviously shows the view looking down Tai Hang Road. I probably shouldn't need to mention that the area looks vastly different today.
Another view from the Peak for this film, except this time we are looking west towards Central. This view reminded me slightly of the opening scenes for Enter the Dragon which, if you remember, were reused for Robert Clouse's follow up movie, Golden Needles. You can view that old post here.
This view from Visa to Canton though looks to be on a higher elevation and slightly south which makes me think it was most likely shot from Mount Cameron, either from Cameron Mansions or #30 Magazine Gap Road.
Following on from the previous post, the camera is turned to the right and we can see the old Central Vehicular Ferry Pier. Built at the end of a triangular causeway, this was the Hong Kong end of the route linked to the vehicular ferry pier at the end of Jordan Road in Kwun Chung.
In the later part of the 60s, the area of harbour to the left of the pier was reclaimed and at some point modifications were made to cater for the newly introduced double-decked ferries, including the construction of a single lane ramp that allowed cars to enter/exit from the top deck.
Unbelievably, to me at least, I have stumbled upon yet another 60's era film that, although shot at Bray studios in Windsor, used proper location footage shot in Hong Kong for its various establishing shots. The film is Visa to Canton (a.k.a Passport to China) and is a Hammer Film production directed by Michael Carreras (who also directed another Hammer Hong Kong film: Shatter). According to various Hammer histories, the film was shot as a pilot for an intended US TV series followup that never happened. Perhaps the lukewarm reception of Hong Kong, shot the same year, turned the US execs off?
The plot is simple enough. Richard Basehart plays Don Benton, a former US pilot who has set up in Hong Kong after the war to run a travel agency. His adoptive family, headed by Mrs Mao (Athene Saylor in, sadly, 'yellowface'), ask him to help rescue their Kuomintang pilot son Jimmy (Burt Kwouk), who has been shot down in Mainland China.
Principal photography was done in June 1960 at Bray, but I can't find any mention of when or who shot the Hong Kong footage. The film was given a December release in the UK that year and, perhaps due to its reception, was released in cheaper black and white only format in the US a few months later.
It has some nice colour imagery of Hong Kong but starts with this nice panning shot looking over Wanchai from the Peak.
