Notes on Piccadilly

I watched Piccadilly tonite, and there is no hope of putting together a coherent review, but it is very much worth your time. I come to it, of course, because of the great reviews and the opportunity to form a judgment about Anna May Wong. She is beautiful in Thief of Bagdad, but it's an eye-candy role. Could she act? If so, her performance in Piccadilly is the one she must be judged by. It was her biggest starring role in something other than Revenge of the Daughter of the Third Cousin of Fu Manchu's Step-Brother. She had considerable input into her look and choreography. If she did anything great that survived, this has to be it.



A few random notes:

• The restored print looks great.
  
• The movie was filmed in London in 1929, and if you don't know what Eliot meant when he referred to the "twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres," it's a good way to find out. It puts you on location in the clubs where thousands of Bertie Woosters knocked back a few and danced the night away.
• The camera work is inventive and carefully thought-out. The tour of the kitchen is revelation, really creating the illusion of a hand-held camera.
  
• The acting is more naturalistic than in Thief of Bagdad.
  
• Charles Laughton has a cameo as "customer upset with a dirty dish"
• The owner of the club goes to investigate the cause of the dirty dish. We first see Anna May Wong dancing in the scullery. She is hotter than Sofia Vergara drinking Pyro Diablo in a steambath.
• The owner asks her to dance for him at the club. She says (I am not making this up): "They wouldn't let me dance again sir - there was trouble between two men along of me - knives, policemen..." Unaware of the concept of foreshadowing, he hires her anyway.
  
• There's a fine 1968 book about silent movies, The Parade's Gone By. Neither Anna May nor Piccadilly is mentioned. But in the interview with Louise Brooks she explains Wong perfectly: "I discovered...that everything is built on movement... Garbo is all movement...she's so perfect people say she can't act."
  
• Emasculating cross-dressing scene, check. Now I know why it played the Castro, anyway...
• A British Film Institute flyer on the film is here.
  
• Her second dance is so hot it makes her first dance look like an accident at a sno-cone factory. Nice cinematography as the camera focuses on her shadow for much of it.
• Her seduction scene makes her second dance look like a training video for nuns.
  
• All in all a remarkable film, a great discovery. The director, Ewald Andre Dupont, deserves as much credit as Wong. Her performance is the best thing in this movie, but it would be worth watching even if her performance had been just average. It's visually interesting, well-paced, and it surprises you.

I want to take a quick stab at the persona Wong was trying to create in Piccadilly, because she's clearly up to something in this film:

If you think of her as an Asian flapper, that's a good start. She'd been that in LA five years earlier. Like the flappers, she's not much into commitment. But she's not carefree and she's not one of the boys - she's serious and feminine. She's street smart and tough, and when she senses that the club owner is weak, she squeezes him for all he's worth. There's definitely a little Mae Westian "hello, sucker" in her act.

What's her motivation? Well, she's poor - she self-consciously covers a hole in her stocking during her first interview with the club owner. She's talented, and knows it. And she's got a fish on the hook. When those are the cards you're holding, mercy, humanity, and close human relationships become somewhat secondary considerations.

Next week: why Anna May Wong's nose was underrated.