Travellers' Checks | Rare footage of Kai Tak airport features in Michael Redgrave air disaster film based on a true story
- Plus a High Speed Rail package from Hong Kong to Xiamen that will take you to the port city in less than five hours
The air-disaster film genre really got under way in 1954, with pilot Dan Roman (John Wayne) losing an engine and running low on fuel during a flight between Honolulu and San Francisco in The High and the Mighty.
The following year, Britain’s Ealing Studios joined the action with The Night My Number Came Up. Partly set in Hong Kong, the film – based on a supposedly true story that was published in a magazine in 1951 – features rare and spectacular views both of and from a twin-engined Dakota landing at Kai Tak airport.
The plot begins with a dinner guest at the home of a Hong Kong civil servant recounting a vivid dream of a plane crash involving fellow diner Air Marshal Hardie, played by Michael Redgrave.
The dream is laughed off over coffee and liqueurs, as the aircraft type and number of passengers on Hardie’s flight the next morning don’t tally with the dream. By the time the flight takes off for Tokyo, however, circumstances have changed and the number of passengers – 13 – matches the dream.
Word of the premonition spreads among the passengers, and suspense builds to a knuckle-whitening finale over a remote, storm-stricken area of Japan.
Thought-provoking and engaging, The Night My Number Came Up is an obscure film compared with two others set in Hong Kong and released the same year – Soldier of Fortune and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing – but is of equal quality.