rdjeffers Monday July 9, 7pm, The Paramount, Seattle"Just imagine the whole place being upset by one little Chinese girl in the scullery." A failing nightclub owner abandons his star for a beautiful Chinese dishwasher, who becomes an exotic sensation. Shosho leaves her old life behind and blossoms in the spotlight, while bitter, jilted Mabel withers on the vine, setting the stage for a tragic confrontation.Directed by a cornerstone of Weimar cinema, the great E. A. Dupont, and exquisitely photographed by Werner Brandes, Piccadillly was British International Pictures "…most expensive and prestigious production at the time." Featured performers include Thomas Jameson as Valentine the amoral boss, Gilda Gray as his faded star, Cyril Ritchard as her fawning partner and Anna May Wong in a dazzling role as the drudge turned star who saves the Piccadilly Club. Charles Laughton's cameo as a drunken, temperamental patron is memorable.In spectacular fashion, Piccadilly exposes the seedy underbelly of nineteen-twenties nightclub life, from the box-office to the scullery, and the fish rots from the head down.

JoeytheBrit Devilishly debonair Valentine Wilmott (Jameson Thomas), a Ronald Colman type with pencil moustache and oil-slick hair, is the owner of Piccadilly, London's top nightspot, at which the glamorously-monickered dance team of Clive and Mabel (Cyrill Ritchard and the real-life queen of the shimmy, Gilda Gray) are the resident dance team. While Clive and Mabel might look the part, they're no Fred and Ginger, part of the reason perhaps being that Clive has a major case of the hots for Mabel, who only has eyes for suave Valentine. Things turn sour for Mabel, however, after Clive dissolves the partnership in a huff after she rebuffs his advances once too often, and then Valentine starts getting cosy with his new female dancer, the sultry Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong). Of course, it's only a matter of time before emotions come to the boil.Piccadilly is a movie about sex. It's about the interaction of adults, and the consequences of actions taken through selfish motives. While there are no real villains in this piece (even though there is a murder), nobody comes out of it untarnished by the events that unfold, although one character emerges surprisingly unchanged. For all its melodramatic tendencies (which are forgivable given the era in which it was made), Piccadilly is quite a remarkable film. Presaging film noir by more than a decade, German director E. A. Dupont's mobile camera makes wonderful use of light and shadow to illustrate the archetypal noir ambiance created by Arnold Bennett's account of the dark passions at play in the superficial environment of the swish Piccadilly nightclub. The camera sweeps across a limehouse saloon filled with rummies and whores with as much relish as it roams the nightclub crammed with bejewelled ladies in gowns and men in dinner suits. It is this rich canvas of sumptuously captured images that overcomes the shortfalls in acting and storyline to deliver a film that is really better than it ought to be. While there are some nice touches in the script – Wilmott, for instance, after watching Clive and Mabel's unconvincing dance performance, travels from club to kitchen to scullery, where he spies Sho-Sho performing a sultry shimmy on a worktop for the entertainment of her workmates, thus linking most of the protganists and depictng their relative social status in one economical and effective sequence – once Bennett has to concentrate on driving the storyline forward, he seems too willing to fall back on increasingly melodramatic plot points that must have been clichéd even back in '29.Although third-billed, Anna May Wong is far and away the star of this movie. Looking remarkably contemporary with her bobbed 'Louise Brooks' hair and her clever facial gestures, she steals every single scene in which she appears, and manages, with the help of one of the screenplay's other strong points, to present ShoSho as a femme fatale without making her out to be a ruthless schemer on the make. Gilda Gray, the star of the piece – although Thomas gets more screen-time than both of the ladies – gives a melodramatic performance by comparison. She looks a little like Garbo, but that's the only resemblance between them.The BFI DVD comes with an optional five-minute sound prologue that leaves the viewer thankful they are watching the silent version. The static camera shows Thomas and his co-actor speak their lines like Cholmondeley-Warner and pal in all those Harry Enfield sketches – evidence indeed that the cinema took a brief but major step backward with the advent of sound.

Igenlode Wordsmith I first saw this film at the live premiere of Neil Brand's new jazz score; everyone was raving about it but I felt I must be missing something, and put it down to the music. (Attractive jazz, but not especially closely tied in to the action -- I've heard Neil Brand do immeasurably better on the piano.) Having seen it again I think I've worked out what's wrong, and it wasn't the music at all. In fact, with hindsight, the new score had actually managed to improve the film.The trouble with this picture -- apart of course from the hand-waving explanation at the ending, worthy of Agatha Christie at her most contrived -- is its characters. Specifically, the reason why I don't warm to this 'classic', for all its technical experimentation and fluid deployment of intertitles, is that there are simply no characters whom I actually like and/or care about, so I find it very hard to get engaged in what happens to them.Mabel is a manipulative drama queen who only got where she is by sleeping with the boss; she comes across as so artificial and dislikeable in the early scenes that it is impossible to feel much sympathy for her downfall. Jim, the other character who is in some sense a victim of events, is largely a background cipher, and while his situation is unenviable we don't get enough sense of him as a person, let alone of his relationship with Shosho, to be able to empathise with his prolonged attempts at strangulation. Victor (expertly played by stage dancing star Cyril Ritchard, of whom we see too little) is clearly a cad, while Valentine Wilmot is a predatory middle-aged employer. Shosho, whom one might expect to be the heroine, turns out to be as manipulative, bitchy and grasping as Mabel. All in all they are none of them very attractive, and the films fails to enlist audience sympathies to follow the fate of any one of them.Perhaps it's childish of me, but I find that I need to become exercised over the outcome for the characters in order to find any emotional appeal in a film. "Piccadilly" I find a strangely unmoving spectacle.On rewatching I also find it hard to see the purpose of the lengthy 'interracial' sequence at the bar, other than politics. If the intent is (very obliquely) to illustrate that it will not be acceptable for Shosho to have a public relationship with a white man, then it's odd that this element turns out to be almost completely irrelevant to the events that in fact transpire. The barrier that Shosho has to overcome is that of her working-class origin rather than her foreign face: given the plot as written, she could equally well be a little Cockney ballet dancer (like Jessie Matthews, busy starring at that time in "This Year of Grace") picked out of the gutter by a wealthy patron as a speciality act to put the established performers' noses out of joint.On reflection I think I'd revise my original vote downwards to 6/10; worth watching out of curiosity if it turns up, but not worth seeking out. (But watch for the background period detail! -- including the famous "Centre of the World" sign on the London Pavilion...)

ferbs54 2004 was a very good year for fans of the actress Anna May Wong. It saw a Wong retrospective here in NYC's Museum of Modern Art, the first biography about Ms. Wong, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, AND the rerelease of 1929's "Piccadilly," shown for the first time in decades. I so enjoyed this film when I saw it on the big screen that year that I decided to have another look at it on this fresh DVD, and my, how good it does look! A fascinating story of the rise of a young Chinese woman from scullery maid to feature dancer at a posh London nightclub, "Piccadilly" is a good introduction to Ms. Wong's many charms for those who have not had the pleasure before, or for those many who enjoyed her work in 1932's "Shanghai Express" and have found it hard to see her elsewhere. "Piccadilly," though a late silent, somehow feels strangely modern, and is beautifully shot and marvelously acted by all. The only disappointment for me regarding this DVD rental was with one of the many extras: a panel discussion about Anna May, hosted by B. Ruby Rich in 3/04 at San Francisco's Castro Theatre and including author Hodges AND another legendary Chinese actress, Nancy Kwan. The sound quality of this extra was so extremely echoed and garbled that it was impossible for me to decipher more than a few words of what I'm sure was a fascinating discussion. Doesn't anybody do a quality check on these DVDs before they're released? Whotta disappointment, indeed!