Piccadilly

An upsurge of interest in beautiful Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (1905-61) makes the DVD debut of this 1929 British film--featuring one of her most seductive performances--timely, even if the movie itself proves to be something of a relic. Piccadilly is almost absurdly old-fashioned (though as a whole not quite so stilted as the sound prologue that was added to the 1929 sound version, and included here as an extra), a romantic triangle set in the world of fashionable London clubs prior to the Great Depression. Wong plays Shosho, a scullery worker at the Piccadilly, who's picked by the owner (Jameson Thomas, as stiff as the name implies) to do a traditional Chinese dance to rev up business. Her success--and a romantic tryst with the boss--disturbs the owner's wife Mabel, who'd been the club's chief attraction, and Shosho is eventually murdered (the story ends in a rushed courtroom finale). The nominal star of Piccadilly is Gilda Gray, who plays Mabel and is famous for having invented the shimmy, although her dancing here looks more like a duck's waddle, and her acting is terrible. By contrast, Wong is subtle and charismatic, and--in her big dance number--positively incandescent. The film is also notable for featuring the first screen appearance of Charles Laughton, as an aggrieved customer, and even in so brief a turn he commands the screen (no wonder Gray, whose number he's interrupting, looks so angry). The disc includes a 20-minute featurette on the composition of the music score that accompanies this excellent restoration, as well as the original 1929 British press kit, and a stills gallery. In addition, the disc contains filmed excerpts from a panel discussion on Wong at a film festival in San Francisco, but the audio is so muffled that much of the conversation is nearly unintelligible. Piccadilly is no unearthed treasure, but Wong's radiance, and to a lesser extent Laughton's cameo, make this a strong optional purchase. (F. Swietek)