Customer Reviews

Piccadilly [VHS]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A lot of attention has been paid to this film first on screen in special showings and now on DVD thanks to the presence of Anna May Wong. Her performance is indeed a revelation but there's much more to the film than just Anna. PICCADILLY is visually a very stylish film thanks to the trademark fluid camerawork of director E.A.Dupont. The sets of the Piccadilly Club are breathtaking. Although stylishly contemporary for when the film was made, they now serve as a time capsule for us today taking us back to 1929 London.

The use of lighting especially in the scenes with Anna May Wong gives added depth to the proceedings. And while this is definitely her movie there are other fine performances as well. Cyril Ritchard as Gilda Gray's partner in the opening scenes (I thought I was watching Fred Astaire), Charles Laughton (in his first film role) as a dissatisfied club customer, and especially King Ho Chang as Wong's boyfriend Jim who ultimately holds the key to the film's resolution. PICCADILLY plays very much like an exotic version of PANDORA'S BOX (made a year earlier and directed by another German, G.W. Pabst) with Wong as a Chinese Louise Brooks. The story is basically a backstage melodrama done many times before and since but it's the style and the performances that really put it over.

I do have one problem with this DVD and that is the score by Neil Brand. Written for 7 piece jazz band, there is an overall sameness to it throughout the course of the film. Scenes such as Wong's Chinese dance or most of the scenes in Limehouse could have used a different and more dramatic scoring in my opinion. The composer is on the special features segment of the DVD explaining what he did and why which is helpful in understanding his choices. It isn't a bad score, it just didn't work for me.

Overall the film is lovingly restored, the DVD has a number of bonus features, and we have yet another top quality release from Milestone Films. People interested in Anna May Wong (and there seem to be many) should check out her performance as a Madame Butterfly like character in TOLL OF THE SEA, the first ever Technicolor feature made back in 1922 when Anna was only 17. It's part of the TREAURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES series which will be reissued in May.

I just got a look at this DVD. The extras on this are worth the price of admission.
As an coauthor of one of the books on Anna May Wong I awaited this like many other keepers of the flame. With three books on Anna May now out, I still was not satisfied. I couldn't figure out what it was that was lacking. When I started looking into Anna May Wong's career some thirty years ago, you couldn't find a picture of her at most libraries. Then the cult phase started. People started writing more and asking around. Occasionally an article would be written in a nostalgic magazine. Eventually her films were selling in the private markets.
Three books.
Now this.....
Anna May Wong's film career is not lost anymore. Milestone did her proud in so many ways. There is footage of the 2004 Asian Film Festival's panel (with Nancy Kwan) on her, though the sound quality on that is rough. There is a vintage introductory sound film made as a prologue to the movie, which is quite interesting. Then there are the photos. As I watched them run by I thought of the searches at the libraries so many years ago, wondering what I would have thought back then had I run into a gold mine such as this. I was also reminded of going through a stack of original photos from another one of her films, wishing I had the thousands required to buy them all. At forty dollars apiece(fifteen years ago)I spent a week's pay, knowing that once I left Hollywood to go back home, I would probably not see the rest of those photos again. Indeed, I have not.
However... this DVD is that gold mine for those who have wished to see Anna May in all her glory.
Maybe the people keeping some of her films locked up will see the beauty presented here and allow the public to enjoy her other works. Milestone did this as a labor of love. Anna May is not an extra in a Fairbanks movie anymore. Milestone gave us Anna May Wong, the star.
Chei Mi Lane

There aren't all that many silent films that hold up well in this day and age, but "Piccadilly" is an exception. An interesting plot, dealing with sex and murder, and the allure of Anna May Wong make this film worth your while.

A nightclub owner, Mr. Wilmot, sees his fortunes decline after, out of jealousy, he fires the male dancing partner of Mabel. Mabel isn't popular enough on her own to sustain the club, and so he offers a Chinese dishwasher named Shosho (played by Wong) a shot at performing.

Shosho's Oriental dance is a big hit with the customers, and she is also a big hit with Mr. Wilmot, replacing Mabel as his love interest. Wilmot's relationship with Shushu stokes jealousy in both Mabel and Shushu's Chinese ex-boyfriend.

Anna May Wong makes the film with her formidable stage presence and radiant beauty. She is very, very sexy in this film. When she is on the screen, you can't take your eyes off of her!

It is very interesting to see how sex was censored in those days. In one scene, where Shushu invites Wilmot up to her room, she very seductively streches out on her couch. Her sexy tease goes on until the two seem to explode in passion. But just as their faces are about to meet in a violent kiss, the scene comes to an abrupt end and we are shown Wilmot leaving her apartment in the morning.

[Unfortunately, the makers of this DVD have a drawing of a topless Anna May Wong on the DVD case. This is false advertising as she does not appear topless. (There is no nudity in the film.)]

I was totally amazed with this movie experience. "Piccadilly" was released in l929, just as talkies were coming into vogue, but when you watch this beautifully restored movie, you'll be amazed at what genius/producer E.A. Dupont and his cast and crew did. Cameraman Werner Brandt and set designer, Alfred Junge, stun the viewer with the intricate camera shots and movements. The camera passes over a row of women in the club's dressing room as they put on their make-up...then the camera tracks former Ziegfeld hotcha dancer, Gilda Gray, as she performs her routine. Later, you see Anna May Wong, dancing down in the scullery of the club, and to no one's surprise she is transformed into an Oriental beauty and becomes a smash hit. While all the attention from film buffs and historians is being lavished on Wong, I thought the voluptuous, beautiful and sexy Gilda Gray was just as good. She was famous/notorious for her Shimmy Dance and which made her millions before the Great Depression wiped her out. Here, you watch her in ravishing gowns, dresses, jewels, hairstyles, furs and she comes across bigger than life. A real woman and not one of those flat-chested flappers who were all the vogue at the time. Wong plays the quiet, deep ShoSho with fascinating mastery. In many shots, she looks exactly like Louise Brooks with her page boy hairstyle. The movie itself is enormously expressionistic, surreal and lit magnificently. Each scene is like a painting by a master. One of the extras is the clumsy, akward ten-minute spoken prologue--a nod to the talkies. The movie begins with striking elan as the credits are painted on the sides of double-decker buses in London's Piccadilly Circus. TimeLine has done another masterful job of bringing this long forgotten treasure out into the real world. Another extraordinary movie treasure presented by TimeLine is "The Olive Thomas Collection," another must-see for fans of all persuasions--whether you're a silent buff or not. Bravo to Gilda, Anna and Piccadilly!

Other than the films of Hitchcock, there was little to distinguish the early British cinema until the films of Powell and Pressberger, but this gorgeous thriller from 1929 is a clear exception to this rule. Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, PICCADILLY is based on an Arnold Bennett story and is told as a kind of murder mystery in reverse (you know something bad's going to happen, but you're not sure to who and by whom until the end when one of the characters is murdered by another). The milieu is the very modern Jazz Age world of a Piccadilly nightclub, where a pair of dancer headliners, Vic and Mabel, are fighting over Mabel's affair with the club's owner, Valentine, and a Chinese girl from Limehouse, Sho Sho, works in the scullery dreaming of dancing onstage. The film has been reissued because of the much overdue renewal of interest in the great Anna May Wing, who plays the fascinating Sho Sho (her performance deserves comparison with Louise Brooks's in a similar role of the same year in THE CANARY MURDER CASE), but the film is of great interest because of its stunning cinematography and direction, shown to great effect on this beautifully restored print. The director and cameramen made spectacular use of lighting, depth of field, and mise-en-scene, to give the nightclub and Sho Sho's and Val's apartments amazingly dense texture and brilliance. There are shots that almost stop your heart with their beauty, such as one of light bouncing off the facets of an old glass doorknob. The script is also very astute in terms of its handling of racial tensions, and there's a remarkable sequence when Val and Sho Sho go to a divey dance club where a white woman is banished for dancing with a black man, with chilling implications for the budding romance between Val and Sho Sho. The DVD contains as an extra a panel discussion of Anna May Wong's career among several Asian-American actors and scholars: it looked to be very interesteing, but the miking in this extra is so horrible that the comments are almost inaudible.

We've been hearing a lot about the legendary Asian-American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) recently. In the last couple of years there have been three book-length bios, some special film screenings and symposia, and a two-part appreciation by Time's film critic, Richard Corliss, to mark the actress' centenary. Now, with the release of her last silent film, Piccadilly, on DVD we can see what all the fuss is about.

It's been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. The Milestone Collection DVD release of E.A. Dupont's 1929 fluid, kinetic backstage show biz opus is loaded with extra features, and boasts a digital transfer of a print lovingly restored by the British Film Institute. Most importantly, it brings us the luminous and transcendent presence of Anna May Wong who bolts out of the murky past and creaky cinematic conventions of the Twenties fully ALIVE.

With her captivating screen presence it is ironic that Wong, a native of L.A., had to travel to England--under the direction of a German, no less--to find and perform a role uniquely suited to her talent and abilities. Yet, her turn as Shosho, and her onscreen transformation from Limehouse scullery maid to glamorous Piccadilly nightclub headliner, is unforgettable movie magic.

It is her economy of movement, her subtle and controlled gestures and expressions that are so remarkable and "modern" to our eyes. These attributes were not lost on her contemporaries--especially to one dazzling young English novelist chronicling the madcap lives of the "Bright Young Things" of London between the wars.

In an article titled "My Favourite Film Star," penned for The Daily Mail, 24 May 1930, a gushing Evelyn Waugh writes, "the one essential requisite in a film star seems to me beauty of movement," and he found plenty of beautiful movement in the movies of "Miss Wong."

A fan since adolescence, Waugh writes of catching "glimpses of her flitting through crook plays of Chinatown," but opines "it was British taste and enterprise that made of her the star we all admire today." Her star-making turn in Piccadilly supplies plenty of evidence for this theory.

Waugh admits that it is "absurd to attempt any definition of her charm," but recognizes that Wong posesses "in the highest degree that subtlety of movement and restraint of expression which the film particularly nurtures."

As her recent biographers have claimed, Waugh too notes that Wong has "several times been condemned to play in films of very slight merit of plot or direction, but always she has lifted them at once into a realm of genuine artistic merit through her individual and inimitable grace and poignancy."

Waugh recognizes the subtlety and control evident in Wong's technique (compare hers to that of the other, more conventional players in this film), and writes "her acting has exactly the balance and modesty and refinement which the average European star loses before she attains the first rank."

The English novelist then asks "But why should her talent be left where it is?" and contributes a decidedly Anglo-centric answer:

"I should like to see Miss Wong playing Shakespeare. Why not a Chinese Ophelia? It seems to me that Miss Wong has exactly those attributes which one most requires of Shakespearean heroines. I cannot see her as Lady Macbeth, but she seems to me perfectly suited for the role of Juliet or to any of the heroines of the comedies."

We can agree with Waugh when he writes that it "seems absurd to me that plays of oriental setting should have to be manufactured for her," but his argument to "put her in one of the traditional English parts," while admirably "colorblind" for the times, seems dubious, limiting and maybe slightly racist from our advanced perspective.

Waugh even claims a certain "racial pride" in his appreciation of Wong, precisely because "it was the much-despised British film industry which first recognized her transcendent talent."

Alas, Wong--who always projected an acute self-awareness and sense of pride--despite the paucity of roles suited to her true talent, can be viewed as either the ultimate Hollywood victim or ultimate Hollywood survivor. As such, she is the stuff that cults are made of, and has been and will be "claimed" by many groups and individuals who empathize with and identify with her for reasons racial, cultural, gender based, sexual, artistic, academic, professional, political, or all of the above.

Now, with Piccadilly readily available on disc, all film lovers are afforded the opportunity to fall in love with the luminous spirit that was Anna May Wong. At last, she belongs to the world again.

This is a great film- I wish it had a great score to go with it. Neil Brand is a fine and talented composer, but in my opinion this score is all wrong. It's too modern for the period, too brassy, too loud, and sounds fake. This is all unfortunate because I heard Brand improvise a piano score to this film several years ago, and it was great. I'm still giving this five stars because of the quality of the picture.

There is much to like about this film, the story, the picture quality, the tinting and of course Anna May Wong. It's so good, in fact, it's a shame it wasn't a talkie, because it has the feel of one. My biggest complaint is with the score. I thought it one of the most annoying scores outside of a public domain release. You're watching a movie from the 20's listening to jazz from the late 40's or early 50's. To me it just didn't work. On top of that my daughter, who was in the other room listening, said it sounded like music from a bad late 70's film. I own several hundred silent films, several with scores by Neil Brand which I enjoyed. I really wish Milestone had offered an alternative score of more period appropriate music on this one because the film itself deserves 5 stars.

Fantastic film. I won't repeat what others have said about this film. It is a very refreshing silent. It doesn't drag.
Beautifully shot and so modern with its images. Needless to say, Anna May is so beautiful in this film. Perky, defiant, and exotic. It was wonderful seeing how good a silent film actress she was. Her facial expressions were timeless!
The story had some holes and the picture quality was adequate. There were a few minor scenes with scratches and jumpiness but overall, it was pleasant to watch.
I docked a half star for the really annoying (to me) modern soundtrack that was done for the movie. I really didn't like it. The repeat over and over again of certain songs began to get to me halfway.
otherwise, a classic silent film to be enjoyed especially if you have interest in anna may wong!

Wait until you see her in that tight skirt, horizontal stripped sweater, beret and rosebud lips. Picadilly was filmed eighty-five years ago and it's silent, but across the gulf of time, Anna May knocked me down with irresistable sensuality. Eyes, gestures, and fashion alone can't explain her allure. She's got "IT". Sorry but you won't see a bare-breasted Anna May in the film. That's a fantasy of the German artist who created the film poster.