Piccadilly (British International Pictures, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 28) my husband Charles and I watched a quite remarkable late-silent movie from 1929: Piccadilly, made in the United Kingdom for British International Pictures by director E. A. Dupont, written by Arnold Bennett and starring Gilda Gray, Jameson Thomas, Anna May Wong, Charles Laughton (in his first film) and Cyril Ritchard. Dupont was actually German-born and had achieved international fame as the director of the 1925 film Variety, which starred Emil Jannings as a middle-aged trapeze artist whose wife (Maly Delschaft) is also his partner in the act. To liven things up they hire a younger couple, Berthe-Marie (Lya de Putti) and Artinelli (Warwick Ward), only Jannings’ character gets obsessed with Berthe-Marie and ultimately murders both her and Artinelli. Dupont wrote the script for Variety as well as directing it, though the story came from a novel by Felix Holländer, and one of the most remarkable things about it is it’s narrated in flashback by Jannings’ character as he’s being released from prison, where he served 10 years for the murders. So it’s not surprising that Piccadilly is also a story about love, sex, jealousy and revenge among show people. Gilda Gray was billed first; she was the first white dancer to do the shimmy and she’d become an international stage star with it. Gray appeared exactly 25 years later on a “Great Personalities” episode of Liberace’s syndicated TV show, along with Nick Lucas, the virtuoso pop guitarist for whom “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” later a novelty hit for Tiny Tim (who sang it in Lucas’s style), was written (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/liberace-great-personalities-guild.html). Liberace felt a kinship to Gilda Gray because they were both of Polish descent and had grown up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Gray’s parents emigrated from Poland when Gray was eight and where Liberace was born.

Piccadilly is set largely at the big nightclub and restaurant called the Piccadilly Club, owned and run by Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas). Gray plays Mabel Greenfield, half of a dancing couple that is the club’s star attraction. Her partner in the act is Victor Smiles (the young Cyril Ritchard), who wants to be her partner off-stage as well – only Mabel has utterly no interest in Victor because Valentine, or “Val” as he’s universally nicknamed, is the only man she cares about “that way.” The two make their entrance dancing down matching staircases before meeting up and partnering each other on the floor – an arrangement Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and director George Stevens copied for the Astaire/Rogers musical Swing Time seven years later – though their dance is interrupted by a persnickety customer (Charles Laughton) who complains that one of the dishes he’s been given is dirty. Val traces the problem and finds out that the dishwashers are being distracted by one of their number, a young Chinese girl from Limehouse (London’s Chinatown) named Shosho (Anna May Wong). Shosho does a hot dance number of her own in the scullery, and Val watches it and fires her for distracting his dishwashing staff. Later Val fires Victor for his sexual harassment of Mabel in full view of the audience, despite the impact this has on his club – all of a sudden the place is virtually empty. He hits on the idea of hiring Shosho and having her dance as part of his floor show, and Shosho agrees on condition that Val pay 80 pounds for an ornate costume from a Limehouse tailor and also that her friend Jim (King Ho Chang) lead her accompaniment on a traditional Chinese lute.

Shosho is an instant hit, but Mabel quits the club out of jealousy and disgust with the way Shosho is being built up as an attraction. Val starts flirting with Shosho, and at one point they go to a sleazy pub in Limehouse whose owner throws out a Black patron for dancing with a white woman. At first Shosho is diffident about her boss’s attentions to her, but eventually she slips him a key to her room and they spend the night together. Dupont cuts away before we find out exactly what happened, but the implication is clear enough that they had some sort of sex. Later, after Val leaves Shosho’s room, Mabel crashes the place and the two women confront each other. Mabel insists that Val is too old for Shosho, Shosho fires back that Mabel is too old for Val, Mabel draws out a small pistol from her handbag and Shosho reaches for a Chinese dagger hanging on her wall. The film blacks out at this moment and it’s only later that we learn Shosho got fatally shot during the confrontation, though it’s still unclear by whom. The obvious implication is that Mabel killed her, but at the coroner’s inquest Jim admits that he killed Shosho out of jealousy that she’d left him for a white guy. He says this while he’s already shot himself, and he arranges it so his body will lie next to Shosho’s as he dies. (It helps this film a lot that we get one last glimpse of Anna May Wong in flashback even after her character is dead.)

E. A. Dupont had a rather strange career as a director; after the international success of Variety Universal hired him for a 1926 film called Love Me and the World Is Mine that seems to have been their attempt at an ersatz Erich von Stroheim film (the movie’s leads were two Stroheim favorites, Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin), but the film flopped and Dupont returned to Europe and spent the next few years alternating between Germany, Britain and France. He made his first talkie, Atlantic – the story of the Titanic – and filmed it simultaneously in German, English and French, but it was apparently a pretty statically acted film and a box-office flop. Then Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 and Dupont definitively relocated to the U.S., where he directed mostly “B” films until 1939, when he was fired from a Warner Bros. “B” called Hell’s Kitchen (with the “Dead End” kids, Margaret Lindsay and Ronald Reagan) for having slapped a cast member who made fun of his accent. Dupont didn’t get a directorial job for another 12 years, until he got a chance to make one of the most undeservedly forgotten films noir of all time: The Scarf, starring John Ireland as an escapee from a mental institution where he was being held for having allegedly murdered his wife. Then he meets a woman (Mercedes McCambridge) wearing the identical type of scarf as his wife had when she was killed with it, and the sight of the same sort of scarf on another woman jogs loose his memory and he’s able not only to prove he didn’t kill his wife but figure out who did. He made a few more films in the early 1950’s, including Pictura (a compilation film about famous painters), Problem Girl, The Neanderthal Man and the pioneering air-disaster film The Steel Lady before dying of cancer in 1956 at age 64.

Dupont’s German heritage is very much in evidence in Piccadilly, notably in the vertiginous camera movements he favored (he had a German cinematographer, Werner Brandes, and a German art director, Alfred Junge, who’d also worked on many of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British films) and the shadowy, chiaroscuro lighting style. I’ve long believed that one can trace the origins of what became film noir in Germany during the 14 years of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933), when this dark, shadowy look was known internationally as “the German style,” and as the great German directors fled Hitler and settled first in France in the mid- to late-1930’s and then to the U.S. once France fell to the Nazis in 1940, they brought the style with them. Film noir came about when directors – many of them German expatriates (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, John Brahm et al.) – realized that “the German style” was a great way to film the “hard-boiled” pulp detective and thriller fiction of authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and others in their style. The bonus features on this Blu-Ray disc edition of Piccadilly included a prologue added in 1929 for a sound version to show in the growing numbers of theatres that had laid off their live in-house musicians and could offer only pre-recorded music and sound effects tracks to accompany “silent” films. The prologue features Jameson Thomas and another actor, playing a character who doesn’t appear in the main body of the film, who’s just returned to Britain from China and is surprised to see the great Valentine Wilmot run a cheap local bar in London when he remembered Wilmot as the owner of the prestigious Piccadilly Club. Wilmot announces that he’s going to tell him the story of how his fortunes sank following the events of the main film. Phrasing the story as an extended flashback brings the film even closer to Dupont’s star-making hit Variety than it is on its own.

The disc also included clips from a panel on Anna May Wong at the 2004 San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, in which four of her movies were revived (Toll of the Sea, Piccadilly, Shanghai Express and Daughter of Shanghai) and a discussion of her legacy was held featuring her friend Nancy Kwan (one of the leads in Flower Drum Song, which Wong was scheduled to have a role in when she died in 1961 at age 56) and pioneering biographer Graham Hodges (the only male on the panel and the only non-Asian). And it featured an interview with Neil Brand, who composed the score for a seven-piece jazz orchestra that appeared on the Piccadilly Blu-Ray release; though quite frankly I’d have preferred to watch it with the original 1929 soundtrack, Brand said he took the job because “I’ve always wanted to score a film noir.” He used jazz music for the nightclub scenes, especially those in which Debroy Somers and His Orchestra (who play themselves in the film, even though we couldn’t hear them) accompany Gilda Gray and Cyril Ritchard in their big dance. Brand said that the shots of Debroy Somers conducting on-screen helped him get the right rhythm for these scenes. Piccadilly is a marvelous movie, showing the silent film at its acme even though it was about to be blasted into oblivion, and though Anna May Wong still had to die at the end for having a sexual affair with a white man (the cliché ending of many of her films) she got to play a character with at least a bit more moral complexity than the ones she’d portrayed in the U.S. Wong is an electrifying actress who for on-screen charisma and appeal wipes the floor with Gilda Gray. It’s also one of those movies I found myself remaking in my head as I was watching it, particularly wishing that Shosho had stayed with her nice Chinese boyfriend (who gets a scene in drag when she asks him to try on the costume Val wants to buy for her act because she wants to see how it looks on someone else first) instead of drifting into an affair (or at least a one-night stand) with Val. And at the ending I found myself mentally remixing the film so Shosho kills Mabel with the dagger before Mabel can shoot her with the gun, then is acquitted when she and Jim persuade the coroner’s jury that she acted in self-defense.