In Search of The Man from Hong Kong: Re-tracing Jimmy Wang Yu’s Footsteps for the 50 Year Anniversary

It’s hard to believe it’s been 50 years since The Man from Hong Kong hit Hong Kong and Australian cinema screens, a rare co-production between the legendary Golden Harvest and flash in the pan Australian production house The Movie Company. Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, the movie cast Hong Kong star Jimmy Wang Yu as a HK cop sent to Australia to extradite a drug mule (played by a pre-fame Sammo Hung), who after the mule is assassinated decides to stick around and take down whoever was behind it. Naturally his rugged masculinity causes all kinds of distractions, from seducing exchange students from Singapore, to local Aussie ladies that fall so head over heels they propose getting cosmetic surgery to make their eyes look more Chinese!

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trenchard-Smith created The Man from Hong Kong as a satire of the James Bond movies, complete with car chases, fisticuffs, and gimmicks like Wang Yu’s penchant for hang gliding. It was also a very intentional move that the villain behind the dastardly deeds turns out to be one-time James Bond actor and Australia native George Lazenby, who originally thought he’d be starring opposite Bruce Lee, having signed a 3-picture deal with Golden Harvest at the Little Dragon’s behest. The latter’s untimely passing meant they never did have the opportunity to appear onscreen together, leaving Lazenby to battle it out with the rough and ready Wang Yu instead.

I first read about The Man from Hong Kong in the early 2000’s, and having planned to move to Australia for a year in my early 20’s (as it happens I’m still here, but that’s another story), I quickly became curious to check out a kung-fu movie that was shot in the country I intended to make home for a while. Looking back, it was one of those movies that didn’t really become widely available on DVD until the Hong Kong Joy Sales release in 2007, however my luck was in – there was an obscure Australian DVD release from ScreenSound Australia (which would be rebranded to The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in 2004). The Australian equivalent of the British Film Institute or the Korean Film Archive, I have no recollection of how I managed to get a hold of the DVD in those early days of the internet, but I did.

In fact I still have it today, in addition to the fully loaded 2016 Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment. For old times sake I recently gave the old ScreenSound DVD a spin, and while the format is far from being obsolete, in this case time hasn’t been kind. Watching it on my 70-inch TV was a bit like viewing The Man from Hong Kong through a Lego Movie filter, and made me question if I should even bother opening some of those IVL released Shaw Brothers DVDs from the same era that remain in the to-watch pile. To commemorate the productions 50-year anniversary, back at the beginning of 2025 I decided to give it a re-watch (this time on Blu-ray) and listen to the audio commentary by Brian Trenchard-Smith. It’d been years since I’d last seen it, and listening to Trenchard-Smith talk about the production made me appreciate it in a whole new light.

One particular comment though caught my attention more than any other. One of my most enduring memories of The Man from Hong Kong over the years was that of the epic almost 10-minute foot chase between Wang Yu and legendary Australian stuntman Grant Page, following the assassination of Sammo Hung. In truthfulness my last re-watch was so long ago that I’d never given much thought to where the chase took place, and in any case the Sydney of 2025 is very different to the one in 1975. However when Trenchard-Smith mentioned it was filmed on the streets of Paddington, a suburb that neighbours the city and is only a 20 minute (brisk) walk from my place of work, the thought struck me – what if I could find the streets the pursuit unfolds across?

After previous successful location hunts in Korea (check out our In Search of the Secret Rivals and In Search of the Single-Legged Man features), I figured how difficult would it be to find locations that are practically right on my doorstep? It was while watching the foot chase to search for any identifiable clues that could get the ball rolling that the deal was sealed – at one point Wang Yu and Page burst out of a small alley and bound over the bonnet of a car, and there in clear view was the name of the street – Little Dowling Street. When I first arrived in Sydney in December 2003 I’d spent a stint living on South Dowling Street, which Little Dowling Street branched off, so there it was – I’d lived practically right on top of where Jimmy Wang Yu had sprinted through 50 years earlier (well, ok, it was a lot less than that at the time – but you get the idea) without even knowing it!

It was a sign, and so it became my mission to find where the rest of the chase took place. Despite technology making location hunting easier than it’s ever been before, as the expression goes the thrill is in the hunt, so rather than plugging a bunch of screencaps into Google Image search, I opted to plug them into my phones photo album instead. I then proceeded to spend a couple of lunch breaks every week power walking across the city into Paddington with phone in hand, attempting to identify any recognisable landmarks from the screencaps that would give away the location. Of course Little Dowling Street was a starting point, and despite Paddington going through a lot of gentrification in recent years, I was surprised at just how recognisable the spot was. The advantage of many of the streets consisting of Victoria-era heritage houses, my hopes were raised that it shouldn’t be too hard to find the other memorable spots.

I have to say I didn’t do too badly, although the location I most wanted to find proved to be surprisingly elusive. The highlight of the entire chase takes part in a small lane, where Grant Page mounts a motorbike in an attempt to getaway, and then in the same shot Wang Yu launches into a flying kick that knocks him off the moving bike, sending them both sprawling across the concrete (the kick is followed by Page ducking into the open door of a restaurant kitchen where a fight breaks out, a part which was actually shot in Hong Kong!). Resorting to posting for some help in a Sydney Then and Now group on social media*, the prognosis originally looked grim, with locals from the era stating how many of those small lanes were sold off decades earlier and absorbed by extending existing properties. Thankfully this turned out to be a false alarm, and the lane was very much still alive and well, instantly recognizable once I knew where it was!

As with any location-based endeavour curiosity eventually got the better of me – there were other scenes shot in Sydney city that were readily accessible, so why didn’t I check them out as well? Wang Yu’s meeting with the pair of Aussie cops played by Roger Ward and Hugh Keays-Byrne at the iconic Sydney Opera House was a no brainer, but I became more curious about a latter scene when the trio park at the side of a road, a pub clearly visible in the background. Following some enthusiastic zooming in I was able to identify it as the Dumbarton Castle Hotel, which after some internet sleuthing I discovered was demolished in 1996, replaced by an apartment block. With so much of The Man from Hong Kong being filmed in suburban Sydney I’d expected most of the locations to look practically unrecognizable today, with perhaps only the odd one still bearing a resemblance to how it appeared 50 years earlier in 1975.

Ironically the opposite turned out to be true, with many of the locations still clearly recognizable today, half a century on from when Wang Yu went on his rampage down under. The area around the Dumbarton Castle Hotel was the exception, which includes the skyscraper Wang Yu and Lazenby battle it out in during the finale, now converted into apartments and all but impossible to identify as the same building Wang Yu abseils down from the top of. As a rare venture between Hong Kong and Australia it was sometimes an odd feeling to be walking down the same streets such iconic action scenes played out on, and for the most part all practically on my doorstep.

Wang Yu was reported to be difficult to work with by many of the Australian crew, a lot of which is revealed in Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (and of which the full interviews can be found on the The Man From Hong Kong Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment). Likely no one suffered more than Trenchard-Smith, whose brief role as a kung-fu fighting lackey saw him come to real on camera blows with the Hong Kong star when the story called for them to fight on top of an elevator car! No matter what difficulties Trenchard-Smith may have encountered during the filming though, the result is one that continues to endure through the many decades that have passed since its release.

There have been other Asian productions that’ve tried to utilise Sydney as a backdrop, from the Tony Jaa starring 2005 fight flick Tom Yum Goong, to the Jackie Chan sci-fi outing Bleeding Steel in 2017, however none have been able to capture the city quite like The Man from Hong Kong, regardless of the era. In one scene Keays-Byrne tells Wang Yu, “I don’t mean to be rude man, but no torture, no thumbscrews – this is Australia.” Indeed it may be, and what can’t be denied is that Wang Yu left his own indelible impression on its most well-known city. Now, what would it take to get Trenchard-Smith to make a 21^st century reboot, even if it would have to be called The Man from Hong Kong, China!?

*Thanks to Allan Marks @ Corgi Tours and Darryl Lewis for assistance with the additional location IDs!