Piccadilly

Another silent: Piccadilly directed by E. A. Dupont and made in London in 1929. Dupont was a German expressionist director, best known for Variety. Piccadilly is beautifully made, crammed with majestic moving camera shots. The film, which has a tawdry show business plot, alternates startlingly realistic sequences with hard-core silent film melodrama. Unfortunately, the story is too slight to support interest and the film feels about a half-hour too long. The plot involves a love triangle – an impresario loses interest in his somewhat florid, if beautiful, star, a glamorous dancer, who is like a silent film era Ginger Rogers. The impresario becomes obsessed by a Chinese scullery maid, one of the girls who washes plates in the kitchen of his night club. He promotes her as a kind of exotic dancer. She shimmies impressively for the crowd and becomes a big star, causing the cast-off dancer, formerly the impresario’s lover, to (perhaps) murder her. Dupont can stage big scenes with great authority but his editing is choppy – he violates continuity rules repeatedly for no good reason and, although each individual shot is beautiful and emphatically (over emphatically) meaningful, the mise en scene in the small scale dialogue sequences doesn’t make any sense. There’s a startling episode about miscegenation that still carries a perverse charge eighty years after it was made – a plump slatternly blonde takes up with a black man in a dive causing the other prostitutes and drunks to expel them. That sequence reveals the dark side to the film which seems to be about the perils of falling in love with someone outside of your own race – in fact, a scene in the film in which the Chinese heroine kisses her lover was excised by the censors. (The Chinese femme fatale is played by Anna Mae Wong, an important actress from the twenties and thirties; she is fantastically beautiful and very exotic looking – her problem was that she looked too Chinese: she was famously passed over for the starring role in the film The Good Earth; the German actress Luise Rainer was hired to play the heroine. There is a panel discussion about Wong recorded –ineptly – as part of the extras on the DVD; it’s academic stuff, incredibly tedious and dim-witted, which is too bad, because Anna Mae Wong, who was born in LA, is a very interesting figure).