A memory which lingers with me from my first visits to London is one of standing alone in the dark, illuminated by a wall of neon, somewhere between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, two great hubs of Central City nightlife. It is late (by English standards, of the time), just after eleven on a warm (by English standards) summer's night. Crowds are flowing through the streets, in one of the last hopeful days of Empire. In a crowded pub, I have just had a "lager and lime" drawn from bottles of specially ordered Danish (Carlsberg) ale, kept in ice filled wooden buckets, just for the heat-wave.

Suddenly, almost in front of me, from an alley beside a larger pub which is closing, comes a white Jaguar XK120. A beautiful Asian woman, wearing red silk, perches confidently at the wheel of the open car. The crowd parts before her, and she moves out into the street and glides away, her long dark hair rippling behind her.

A little Englishman at my side touches the brim of his cap in a salute to her, and turns to me. "She's the guv'nor's lady," he says. "He's 'ad a number of Or-ey-ental lookers like 'er act his top-o barmaid. Twenty year ago, 'e 'ad Merle Oberon, and she drove a posh roadster, too, I can tell you. Has an eye for the Or-ey-ental ones, does the guv'nor."

We stood in the road, watching a dream beyond either us retreat into the London night.

Urban Legend? Perhaps. Was the place called The Red Lion? I can't remember.

I'm reminded of that night as Director Ewald Andre Dupont's brilliant opening credits for his 1929 Silent/Sound PICCADILLY roll by on the sides of London double-decker buses, and we glimpse marquees of famous theaters and clubs. One sign announces "C.B. Cochran's Revue of 1929." [Cochran was the British Ziegfeld, legendary finder of talent, and perhaps germane here, a breaker of "the color barrier."] Couples surge along wide streets, turn and smile at each other. This night is long before my visit, and London is for a time yet the largest, most populated city in the World, the capital of the greatest Empire the World has known.

Dupont, continuing in golden sepia, then shows us the jewel of this imperially seductive equator, The Piccadilly Club. Inside, the hard-smoking owner, Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas), is making his way through a throng of well-dressed patrons, in a search for his dancing star, Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray). [Is that slim 22 year-old Ray Milland (THE LOST WEEKEND, Wilder, 1945) standing about in evening dress? Certainly, it is: his first appearance in Motion Pictures.]

We cut away to the Club's luxurious powder rooms, where sleekly gowned women at vanity tables, attended by maids, are almost furtively turning each on to a deadly addiction. No, not opium. They are exchanging and tentatively puffing on the latest craze for upper class English women: a cigarette. ["Blow some my way"; "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," etc.]

Meanwhile, in a black-sequined, plunging halter-necklined number, preparatory to her act, Star Mabel makes her way to the top the dual grand staircases, which swoop down to the main floor on either side of the Art Deco room, where the toffs have been seated and are beginning to order their dinners. Her dancing partner, the misnamed Victor Smiles (Cyril Richard -- another debut), finds her there and attempts to kiss her in the center of her nearly bare back, but Mabel's heart belongs to the Boss, Daddy Wilmot (which she proves in a contemporaneous brief encounter), and she summarily rebuffs him. "You know how I detest your doing that." Victor retreats doglike to his own place at the top of the other stairway.

The house is into their second bottle of champagne, and the soup is being served, when Mabel and Victor traipse down the stairways, smiling and reaching passionately toward each other, as Debroy Somers and his orchestra strike up something which looks like a tango.

[Debroy Somers did indeed lead this band, and we should remember that in the late 1920's and early 1930's, years before the popular acceptance of Black Jazz, before Swing, before the fusion of Bebop, the finest sophisticated dance orchestras in the World were English. (The most famous being Ray Noble's, which eventually ended up playing for the Charlie McCarthy Show on American Radio.) Here, I must note a puzzling miscarriage of the PICCADILLY print I saw. Neil Brand's score (added to this silent film) is way out of synch, so that the illusion of the dance is ruined. A strength of PICCADILLY is that it survives this failure.]

And as we learn, as all is not well with the tango team (or on the soundtrack), there is also a problem in the restaurant. A beefy, dyspeptic diner (Charles Laughton -- close to his first film role, aged thirty, looking 55) has found a spot on his soup bowl. Waiters hover, attempting to placate him. The Maitre d' is summoned from his place, a few steps down from his boss on the stairway. Unsuccessful in smoothing over matters, he returns to report the complaint to Valentine Wilmot, who suggests that something be done.

"The restaurant is the restaurant," the Maitre d' huffs. "The kitchen is the kitchen."

Lighting yet another cigarette, Wilmot breaks off watching his dance team and sidles through the ecstatic "standees" back into the kitchen. The Chef, wreathed in steam, shrugs his shoulders: "The kitchen is the kitchen. The scullery is the scullery."

Further back, along a narrow hallway, down a staircase, Wilmot comes on half-a-dozen greasy-looking women smoking cigarettes and passing dishes through large basins of what looks like dirty water. They pass the dishes to other women, who dunk them in other basins of equally dirty liquid, and hand them to yet other women wiping the dishes with filthy towels. [This unpleasant secret was the centerpiece of George Orwell's wonderful 1933 first book, a memoir, Down and Out in London and Paris.] In the center of the congregation, the camera snags the torn stockings on a pair of attractive legs, tilts up past a short skirt and blouse to reveal Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong), who is dancing to solace the others in their drudgery. Wilmot's practiced eye takes note of the beautiful Chinese girl, who has lost her job in a Limehouse club by causing a knifing, for being too attractive.

It is a rawly spectacular entrance, fully in the tradition of Director Dupont, a master German Expressionist.

In another part of the jungle, Victor Smiles is informing Mabel that he is fed up with The Piccadilly Club and wants her to go to Broadway with him, but she dismisses the idea. He then retreats to Valentine Wilmot, thinking that the Boss will offer him a raise to stay with the Club, but Wilmot has grown tired of Mabel and her airs. In order to get rid of her, Wilmot immediately accepts Victor's resignation. Then, he tells a startled Mabel that she cannot remain the star of the Club without a partner.

Later that night, Wilmot smokes nervously at the foot of a circular staircase backstage, waiting for Sho-Sho. After he sees her in a costume he is lent her, they go back upstairs together. "You'll see what I can do," she says, taking his arm, "and then you'll tell me what you can pay."

Valentine Wilmot has discovered his new star, but it requires him to go to a blue-tinted Limehouse, down the Thames in the London Docklands, to negotiate with her agent, a beefy man of mixed race. Wilmot must satisfy both the agent by agreeing to pay exorbitant rent for Sho-Sho's elaborate costume, and by taking her boyfriend, Jim (King Ho-Chang) on as a waiter. Sho-Sho plays mistress of the situation in giving insolent looks to the older men, and forcing Jim to model the headdress she will wear in her act.

By the time Jim discovers on Wilmot's desk a little figurine of a nodding wiseman he gave Sho-Sho, and Mabel collapses in an elaborate pile of feathers upon realizing Sho-Sho and Wilmot are having an affair, the plot of a murder triangle is set.

PICCADILLY gives modern audiences a look at the Silent Film at its zenith, a janus view back on spectacular Art Deco settings by Alfred Junge (BLACK NARCISSUS, 1947), the Expressionistic camera angles and framings of Cameraman Werner Brandes (MOULIN ROUGE, Dupont, 1928), the literate dialogue cards of Novelist Arnold Bennett (The Old Wives Tales, The Riceyman's Steps), and views of a London now gone; and forward to the stylized work of Josef Von Sternberg, the Musicals of the 1930's, a number of coming stage and movie stars, and inter-racial romantic relationships.

Arnold Bennett's screen scenario, rather than emphasizing racial tension, dwells on the conflicts of age. "He's too old for you," observes the about-to-be discarded Mabel. "Yes, he's too old for me, but you're too old for him." But Jim recognizes racial jealousy, which results in a climactic scene similar to that of Fritz Lang's M (1931). And later in the film, when Sho-Sho takes Valentine down to show him the nightspots of Limehouse, racial resentment flares, surprisingly when a cockney woman identified as "Vamp" (Ellen Pollack in a memorable bit) is threatened for dancing with a blackman. She reacts by trying to raise the rabble against the mixed-couple of Sho-Sho and Valentine. [Because Wilmot is upper class, they escape safely.]

Ironically, PICCADILLY marked practically the end of famous Dancer Gilda Gray's career. The "inventor" of the Shimmy, she made only one other film (Rose Marie, 1936). PICCADILLY is better remembered as perhaps the finest role Anna May Wong ever had. Born in Los Angeles, cousin to the great cinematographer, James Wong Howe, she played various minor parts in Hollywood Silents, until she went to Europe looking for better roles. After PICCADILLY, she created a memorable character in Von Sternberg's SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932) before returning to Britain for several more good films.

Director E.A. Dupont (as he is remembered) is also something of an irony. Born in Germany, he made his reputation with stylized masterpieces there (VARIETY, 1925), and in France (MOULIN ROUGE, 1928), before going to Britain for PICCADILLY. He spent much of his remaining career in Hollywood, finishing up with such gems as PROBLEM GIRLS (1953).

The London of PICCADILLY is long gone. The center of London has become more and more American. Limehouse and the London Docklands have been re-developed as London's new center for global business. The Movie PICCADILLY is a beautiful artifact, and if its strangely compelling musical score, with its homage's to CHINATOWN and LA CONFIDENTIAL were in synch, I would give it five stars.

As it is, see it if you can, for its other riches.

And for me, the image of that Asian girl in the white XK120, which seems as if it were yesterday.

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CHINATOWN --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-172E-12DE7EC9-38F8EF67-prod3

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older