Piccadilly

Piccadilly is an very entertaining show business melodrama.  It's one of the last silent films, released in 1929.   The production is international.  Although she receives second billing, the film stars Anna Mae Wong, an important Asian-American actress, principally famous for her work in silent pictures.  (Of Chinese ethnicity, Wong is also an exemplary victim of American racism in casting -- routinely, she was passed over in starring roles that were instead cast with non-Asian actresses.)  The movie was shot in England and directed by E. A. Dupont, a famous German moviemaker, best known for his documentary-style Variety, shot in Germany in 1925, a melodrama about circus trapeze artists.  Dupont is a flashy director with an inventive wise-ass mise-en-scene --  he uses lots of whip pans, dollies in for big dramatic close-ups, and moves the camera fluidly through elaborately lit sets.  A point of view scene in which a impresario tours a disreputable Chinese restaurant and gambling joint is exemplary --  the camera tracks the Caucasian impresario, tilting right or left to mimic his perspective as he glances at the various denizens of the grotto-like place.  The film's titles are raffishly shown as advertisements on the sides of double-decker buses coursing through the entertainment district of Piccadilly Square.

Piccadilly's plot involves romantic triangles.  First, we are introduced to the dancing duo, Vic and Mabel, performers at Valentine Wilmott's Piccadilly night club.  ("Why is it called a club?" someone asks.  "To make it seem exclusive," another answers.)  Vic loves Mabel and egotistically assumes she loves him back, but, instead, she is courting Wilmott, apparently for mercenary purposes.  Wilmott fires Vic after punching him in the nose to get him out of the way.  But a title has warned the audience that the only reason women come to the place is to gawk at the handsome, if smarmy, Vic.  So the business starts to fail after Vic leaves.  Wilmott has seen a Chinese dishwasher dancing on a table in the scullery.  This is Shosho, a girl who lives in the Chinese ghetto in Limehouse.  When a surly patron has complained about a dirty plate (the customer looks like the obese diner offered a postprandial dinner mint in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life), Wilmott fires Shosho.  She's wily and seductive and the film suggests that she has sex with Wilmott to get her job back.  Wilmott tricks her out in an elaborate Balinese Temple Maiden outfit and has her perform.  (Her boyfriend and, possibly, pimp, Joe plays some kind of Asian zither to accompany her.)   Her act is wildly successful.  But this upsets Mabel who resents the competition with her performance and histrionically faints when Shosho gets a standing ovation.  Shosho takes Vic on a tour of her neighborhood and the couple end up at a crowded dive.  When a jauntily dressed Black man dances with a White woman, there is an angry confrontation and, almost, a  riot.  This leads to Vic and Shosho fleeing the place since they are also a mixed race couple.  Vic goes to Shosho's flat, an exotic lair with huge gold fish swimming in bathtub-sized basin and a weird wall-hanging that seems to show a Buddhist Bodhissatva with multiple arms.  There's a soft focus clinch, lit as if by von Sternberg, all baubles and bangles glinting in the murky darkness, but the racism of the period precludes any images of Vic and Shosho actually kissing.  When Vic leaves the place, he seems to pay Joe as if to confirm that this man acts as Shosho's pimp.  (Actually, the meaning of the gesture is unclear.)  Mabel shows up at Shosho's apartment to plead for her man.  Shosho contemptuously humiliates Mabel and there's a shooting, the actual event again concealed by obtuse lighting and staging -- it's like the kiss, more or less, off-screen.  A coroner's inquest is convened and the film devolves into a courtroom scene, leading to the revelation that Shosho was actually murdered by Joe in a sort of honor-slaying -- perhaps, he's Shosho's brother and not her pimp.  (Shosho treats everyone with contempt -- she has earlier made poor Joe model her Balinese Temple-girl outfit.)  The last third of the picture is unsatisfying.  The courtroom sequences lack visual zest and are interrupted by point-of-view restagings of the shooting -- a familiar device today but probably relative innovative in 1929.  With Wong out of the picture, the film deflates and becomes less interesting.  Furthermore, the women seem to fighting over an inadequate prize -- Vic isn't much of anything and has very little on-screen magnetism.  The ending is amusing, again in a wise-ass street-smart sort of way -- a street vendor is selling newspapers with big headlines about the case involving Shosho's shooting.  A guy expresses great interest in the paper but that's only because he wants to see the horse-racing results -- he's got a bet outstanding.  He throws down his cigarette butt which is retrieved by a bum wearing a sandwich-board:  it's advertising a new revue called "Life Goes On."

Anna Mae Wong is tall with very long legs.  She has a completely flat chest and is very slender.  Her dancing basically consists of hula-girl hand gestures and wiggling her butt.  Nonetheless, she's an extremely charismatic figure, particularly because she seems highly intelligent and conniving.  Wong vacillates between feigning helplessness and calculating with icy determination her next move.  She can seem innocent and virginal, friendly, and frighteningly inscrutable and villainous is the same short scene.  The film is just variant on the "Dragon Lady" theme, but Wong has that indescribable quality of stardom -- the camera loves her and she's entrancing.