The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Lok Sin Road, San Po Kong

Just another one of those out of the window shots that I have been able to trace. In this case around the Kai Tak Nullah area (Kai Tak nullah is an infamous manmade waterway next to the old airport site that was responsible for greeting newly landed arrivals with a smell so bad many hopped back on their planes and demanded to be flown somewhere that smelt nicer, like...erm...Milton Keynes).

Anyway, here is the grab. It's at the part of the film when Chiang's female passenger decides to have her baby right there and then.

 The modern streetview shows us that there are still a few recognisable buildings around. We have the two tower blocks in the distance (seen behind his rear view mirror in the top picture), these are blocks A and B of the Shun Ling Building. Still going strong 40 years on.

The building on the far right of our streetview shot, which can also be seen from the taxi, is the Ng Wah Catholic Secondary School. On the second screen grab we can see a building facing us along what is Choi Hung Road. This is also still around, although had a more recent paint job and is the Choi Hung Building. It has a small white building to the right of it (our right that is) which is in fact a branch of Standard Chartered.

Anyway, much of everything else has gone but I have a feeling we will be revisiting the nullah at a later point.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - True Light Lane, Kowloon Tong

Have you ever wondered what the area around Kowloon Tong station looked like before Festival Walk was built? Well, we manage to catch a brief glimpse of True Light Lane during the scene when Chiang's car is hijacked by the bank robbers. It may or may not be the same hydrant (although it has been moved).

I can't get a perfect angle from Streetview but will perhaps make an effort to take a shot with the camera the next time I am there (i.e. everyday, I just need to remember to take the camera).

Okay, of course like everywhere in Hong Kong this place has seen a lot of development - most obviously in the form of the much larger station (The Taxi Driver was filmed before the major expansion from one track into two) and now of course we have the massively massive Festival walk mall at the back - although this wasn't opened until the late 90's. But we can see that once upon a time the site on which it now sits was basically a big massively massive hill!!

And the area from where the robbers appear looks to be steps leading down to the old single track railway line - filmed at a time when walking on the tracks was still common and allowed. These days you would have to be stupid as well as nimble in order to take the same route.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Yau Ma Tei Police Station, Kowloon

Despite being a different film it was this scene from The Taxi Driver that helped me find the last Enter The Dragon location I just posted about - and all of it courtesy of an educated guess by David Bellis over at Gwulo.com.

I was scratching my head with this one for a while because it shows a colonial 'barrack' type building in what looks like the middle of Kowloon. I initially dismissed the Police Station simply because the surrounding area just didn't look right. Foolish me and I really should know better by now.

Anyway, this scene involves Chiang using his taxi driving kung fu skills to take out a bag thief who has just snatched someones hand bag. The key to the scene is in the background as you can see.

Okay, so now we know it's the Yau Ma Tei Police Station, or strictly speaking one side of it - the side that runs along Canton Road. Canton Road is the road we see in the top screen grab and here is the best approximation of that angle with what's available on Streetview.

Another thing that threw me off the trail is the 1975 paint job - as you can see the building currently has the standard police colours of grey and blue (all Police stations in HK are this colour), but in 1975 - and indeed 1973 in the last post I was referring to - the walls are brown with white-painted columns.

Anyway, in the lower screen grabs, the thief (played by Tino Wong Cheung) runs down Canton Road and turns left into Kansu St where he is clobbered by a Hung Gar fist wielding Chiang. The whole area has of course undergone a complete change and the large open space that can be seen here and in ETD is now surrounded by the usual HK highrise development. The only view available to the station from Kansu St now is where it intersects with Canton Road (see below).

Enter The Dragon - Bruce Lee (1973) - Kansu Street, Yau Ma Tei

Here is a spot that I have been scratching my head over for a vast amount of time. Its anonymity inducing a vast amount of frustration on my part. However, thanks to a small glimpse of a distinctive building facade in the very background I have finally managed to pinpoint its location.

The shot is from the opening sequence when we get the travelogue-style tour of various parts of Kowloon as we see the arrival of the various fighters, and it features a rather wonky-looking line of shophouses.

If you look closely to the left of the wonky building - just behind the support struts - you'll see what appears to be a columned building behind it. You wouldn't necessarily recognise it today - it's the Yau Ma Tei Police Station - because the open balconies have all been filled in and the white paint job has been replaced by standard police issue blue/grey.

Anyway, what it means is that the modern building we can see is the older wing of the YMT Jockey Club Polyclinic and the road at the bottom left is Kansu Street. The small street (with the parasols) in front is the end of Reclamation street and it joins with Battery Street in a loop on the right. This old block is obviously long gone (it wouldn't surprise me if it had collapsed immediately after they turned the camera off!) and has since been replaced by the Kansu Street Jade Hawkers Bazaar.

This whole area has, unsurprisingly, changed immensely. The open square has been turned into a basketball court, a new wing of the Polyclinic has been built that now blocks the view through to the Police Station (on Canton Road) and the Gascoigne Road flyover now covers most of Kansu St.

Speaking of the flyover, here is a google grab from there because it provides the best angle to see the area from as similar viewpoint to where they filmed from.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Lung Cheung Road, Kowloon

Not Lung Cheung Road as much as the view from it. We've been close to this location before in Sunset and I recently blogged about Lung Cheung Road Lookout on my Hong Kong & Macau Stuff Blog (my other blog is currently on hold until I can muster enough motivation to start it up again) but this time we get to see a reasonable view from a vantage point next to the aforementioned 'lookout'.

Unfortunately I am grabbing these shots from a VCD and the resolution is quite poor and doesn't zoom well, but the view is over Kowloon and in fact the nearest buildings at the bottom are part of the nameless reservoir that sits just down the slope.

The flat bit and small building bottom of the screen are the reservoir and nearby pumphouse, still there after all these years. For geography's sake, the aforementioned Lung Cheung Lookout is off screen to the right in this above shot. In the film the camera pans left and we see in the distance the checkerboard in Kowloon Tsai (see shot below).

The above glimpse of Lung Cheung Road shows the area just before where Lung Yan Road intersects. Much of this shaved slope is overgrown today as you would expect, and there is also a pedestrian flyover here now so walkers can cross to Lung Yan Road (it is teh main road route up the side of Beacon Hill).

The last shot shows our taxi passing the point of the road where Lung Cheung Road lookout is/was. These days it has its own carpark and slip road,m but in the 70's it was basically just a flat promontory that cars could pull into.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - The Hyatt Hotel, Lock Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

An unmistakeable place thanks to its unique ramped entrance from Lock Road. The hotel was recently knocked down (in 2006, the same year I moved to HK) and replaced by the godawful iSquare mall. Prior to being the Hyatt it was originally called The President Hotel and opened for business in 1963.

I'm not sure when it was rebranded as a Hyatt (i.e. so was it still The Preseident or The Hyatt when this film was made in 1975?) but it remained so until its demolition which is when Hyatt moved their main Kowloon-side hotel over to The Masterpiece (above K11 mall). Judging from the screen grabs below, it looks as though the up ramp started at the Peking Road end of the building. In the first screen grab below, the building to the right of the flag poles (to the right of the taxi) is the Universal Commercial Building which still stands, and the doorway immediately behind those flag poles was the basement entrance to Club Tasagore (now Delaney's) whose sign can be seen in films such as Enter The Dragon and The Protector.

Bottom picture shows the down ramp with the buildings of Lock Road on the opposite side of the street. From what I can tell, all of those buildings are still standing.

As an interesting and film-related aside, it was this hotel that served as one of the early meeting places between Bruce Lee and Raymond Chow, and also where Lee was first introduced to Betty Ting Pei. The hotel had a rather famous restaurant bar called Hugo's which seems to have been one of Bruce's favoured watering spots. 

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Waterloo Road, Kowloon

Yes, another one for Waterloo Road except this time we are at the section that sits between Argyle Street and Prince Edward Road West. Specifically it's the part where the Prince Edward Road flyover begins. The scene involves a guy who is obviously a bit on the stingey side who is riding in a cab that is stuck in a jam and his fare keeps ticking up. In 1975 the metre ticks over by 20 cents at a time - not bad considering the flag fall has almost doubled just in the past 7 years I have been living here. But then again we are talking about the 1975 value of 20 cents which I guess was much higher.

Anyway, the exact spot is pretty much at the start of the flyover and there are still some recognisable buildings to be seen. The historical point to note - well, at least for me - is that this was filmed whilst the flyover was still under construction.

It looks like the above shot was taken from the under-construction flyover, looking south towards Argyle St direction. The streetview grab below is about as close as I can get, but note that the building behind the low red wall in the lower shot is the same one with the pedestrian standing next to it in the screen grab. It's called May Moon House and was built in circa 1959). Likewise, a bit further down the road is a low rise building - very typical of the area post-war before all the high stuff started going up - and its red window frames can be seen in the screen grab above. It doesn't have a name but the address is 93 - 95a Waterloo Rd and was built a few years earlier circa 1956.

This shot above is actually looking the other way - towards Prince Edward Road - and if you look in the distance you can see the front (or at least part of) St Theresa's Church. Below is another southward looking shot. Other than the flyover, this area doesn't seem to have changed much since the film was made.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Tai Po Road Interchange, Kowloon

We get around quite a bit in this film - well, it is about a heroic taxi driver after all - and here is a place that hasn't changed much since it was filmed. It's the Tai Po and Ching Cheung Roads' interchange above what was the So Uk Estate. Speaking of the So Uk estate, here is a quick glimpse of it in the background below. The place is famous as one of Kowloon's early Govt estates and for giving us the likes of the Hui brothers, but was slated for redevelopment a while back and is currently (I say 'currently' but most of it has already gone) being demolished.

 More of the So Uk estate below as well as the road's complicated flyover system. Basically Ching Cheung Road continues on into NW Kowloon but if you take the flyover you continue up to Tai Po Road (Kowloon section) as it heads up past what was once the Carlton Hotel (now a development called Carlton Villas), on past Caldecott Road and the Kowloon Reservoir and on past the Shatin Inn into the Tai Wai section of Shatin district.

Anyway, enough of the geography lesson, here is the same interchange now courtesy of the ever reliable Streetview (best angle I could get without physically going there - although practically this place is just down the road from where I live, there isn't an obvious pedestrian route to get there).

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Cornwall Street, Kowloon Tong

Back to Kowloon Tong for another scene (seems to be quite a few scenes were filmed in and around the Cornwall Street area). This time it is another out of the taxi window shot as a couple of Chiang's taxi driver buddies are on the lookout for the robbers who have framed Chiang for a bank robbery.

Here is the first shot of one driver followed by two of the second driver. I've lumped them all together because these scenes were actually filmed along the exact same part of Cornwall Street. In front of #s * & 10 to be precise. The top shot here shows the facade of #8 Cornwall Street

These subsequent shots show the west side of #8 and the front of #10.

You may remember #10 from a previous post concerning another Chiang film called Friends. There was a fairly decent snap of it opposite Kent Road (you can also see a bit of #8 too).

Anyway, these are both low rise blocks that were built in the 1960's (actually, #8 was built circa 1970, #10 1963). They are still there today in their high-ceilinged-low-rise splendour.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Argyle Street, Mongkok

Here is a shot that is still fairly recognisable even today. It's the junction of Nathan Road and Argyle Street in Mongkok. The reason it's so easily recognised is because of the HSBC building on the opposite corner. It was built in 1969 and still looks pretty much as it did back then.

 Here is a modern view courtesy of Streetview.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Waterloo Road, Kowloon Tong

Waterloo Road is a pretty long road by Hong Kong standards so I should perhaps be more specific. In this scene Chiang and his buddy pull up at some lights and have a chat. You may not be able to recognise it now but it happens to be at the junction with Cornwall Street before the flyover was built.

There are two giveaways in the bottom shot, the first is the long building in the background which is actually part of what is now called Kowloon East Barracks, but back in the 70's was known as Osborn Barracks. This building still stands (in fact the whole barrack area seems to have been left empty since the handover - a location in the middle of prime real estate and I understand from friends who used to live in the barracks - it was the married quarters - that the flats inside the barrack are ABSOLUTELY HUGE by HK standards).

Anyway, the second giveaway is the wall behind the pedestrian on the right hand side. This wall is still there and like our last blog post concerning Devon Road, the wall seems to be still painted in the same colours now as it was nearly 40 years ago!! Here are some recent streetview snaps.

 As you can see, the flyover pretty much obscures the view these days, but note the wall in the second shot (it's off the right hand side in the upper one) looks pretty much the same as it did in 1975.

The Taxi Driver - David Chiang (1975) - Devon Road, Kowloon Tong

A bit of a change as I delve into this film from 1975 which, by virtue of its taxi-centric nature, is revealing much about the landscape of 1975 Hong Kong. The basic premise is David Chiang as a taxi driver for "The Blue Taxicabs Ltd" company (a real taxi company) who is also an expert in kung fu and is on the right side of virtue (in other words it's pretty much all the other characters he has played but in a taxi environment). Lots of places to see, some of which I have been able to identify and some are real stumpers. I like a challenge.

But anyway, let's kick off this film with a couple of shots from Devon Road in Kowloon Tong. This one was identified by the wall of "Air House" the former residence of the Air Commander in HK. Judging from the screen shot it still has the same paint work now as it did in 1975. The background is interesting because it shows us what was there before the Mormons (or whatever silly religious group it is) built their buildings along Cornwall Street at the back. Anyway, here are the shots...

So here is Mr Chiang himself driving the taxi up Devon Road and as he pulls in to pick up the couple at the side of the road we can see the two-tone wall to their back. Look at the shot below and you'll see the wall hasn't changed a single bit - still the same two-tone paint job. The place is now known as 1a Cornwall St but under British rule was nicknamed Air House. I did take some shots of the place for my other blog a while back which you can see here.

As mentioned, there are newer buildings at the back (along the north side of Cornwall Street), but it's interesting to note that the pink and white wall on the left above (also seen in the film grabs) also houses one of the Kowloon Tong Estate's original houses. I will try and grab a picky of this place at some point because I am here almost every day as I catch my shuttle bus back home.