Ewald André Dupont - Piccadilly (1929)

One of the pinnacles of British silent cinema, Piccadilly is a sumptuous showbusiness melodrama seething with sexual and racial tension. Chinese-American screen goddess Anna May Wong stars as Shosho, a scullery maid in a fashionable London nightclub whose sensuous table-top dance catches the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. With her exotic dance routines she rises to become the toast of London and the object of Wilmot’s erotic obsession — prompting the bitter jealousy of Mabel, his former lover and star dancer (played by Ziegfeld Follies star Gilda Gray). Contemporary fears and temptations of miscegenation are played out through Wong as the subject of fatal passions.







German director E.A. Dupont was one of the world's most celebrated filmmakers when he came to London, by way of Hollywood, for the swan song of silent cinema. A visually eloquent and sometimes dazzling backstage melodrama, Piccadilly is a variant on Dupont's German masterpiece Variety (1925) and his first British film, Moulin Rouge (1928). Released in 1929, Piccadilly similarly maneuvers a mobile camera around a splendid set to track a tawdry showbiz sexual triangle: The pomaded proprietor of the deco nightspot Club Piccadilly (Jameson Thomas) dumps his star jazz baby (Gilda Gray) to pursue a younger performer, the lithe slum goddess Shosho (Anna May Wong), first seen entertaining her fellow scullions with a dreamily sensuous tabletop dance.

Although Gray is the movie's nominal star, and Charles Laughton has a memorable cameo as a swinish club customer, Piccadilly is stolen by Wong, a Chinese American product of Hollywood High, whose movie career was initially boosted and then quickly stymied by racial prejudice. Her hair bobbed and banged in the manner of contemporary expatriate and sister femme fatale Louise Brooks, Wong exudes a similarly cool, appraising sexuality. She shimmers and so does this newly restored, alternately blue- and amber-tinted, print. (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)









Una de las cumbres del cine mudo británico, Piccadilly es un melodrama suntuoso sobre el mundo del espectáculo, lleno de tensión sexual y racial. La estrella chino-estadounidense Anna May Wong es Shosho, una ayudante de cocina en un club de moda de Londres, cuya danza sensual sobre una mesa llama la atención de Wilmot Valentine, dueño del club. Con sus rutinas de baile exótico se convierte en la favorita de Londres y el objeto de obsesión erótica de Wilmot - provocando los celos amargos de Mabel, su antigua amante y bailarina estrella...










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