Piccadilly

Starring:Gilda Gray, Anna May Wong, Jameson Thomas, Charles Laughton, Cyril Ritchard, King Ho-Chang, Hannah Jones, Debroy Somers, Charles Paton, Ray Milland, Ellen Pollock, Harry Terry, Jack Raine, Gordon Begg
Director: Ewald André Dupont
Studio: Image Entertainment
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Description
Valentine Wilmot, the owner of the popular Piccadilly Club finds his lead male attraction, Victor Smiles (Cyril Ritchard) has quit and that the public has judged Victor's partner Mabel as over the hill. Though they are lovers, Valentine must find another dancer to replace Mabel or face an uncertain future. When a customer (Charles Laughton in his first feature film) complains of a dirty dish, Valentine discovers the answer to all his problems down in the club's scullery

Description

Valentine Wilmot, the owner of the popular Piccadilly Club finds his lead male attraction, Victor Smiles (Cyril Ritchard) has quit and that the public has judged Victor's partner Mabel as over the hill. Though they are lovers, Valentine must find another dancer to replace Mabel or face an uncertain future. When a customer (Charles Laughton in his first feature film) complains of a dirty dish, Valentine discovers the answer to all his problems down in the club's scullery…

Customer Reviews:

More Anna May Wong Please!.......2007-06-22

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.

A Fascinating Silent.......2006-03-03

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 loved the film, but I hated the score........2005-08-01

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.

Amazing!.......2005-07-29

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!

Astonishing Expressionist British silent.......2005-06-03

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.

Average customer rating:

More Anna May Wong Please!
A Fascinating Silent
I loved the film, but I hated the score.
Amazing!
Astonishing Expressionist British silent

Piccadilly [Region 2]
Starring: Gilda Gray , Anna May Wong , Jameson Thomas , Charles Laughton , and Cyril Ritchard
Director: Ewald André Dupont
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

( P ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
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ASIN: B00027NW7O

Customer Reviews:

More Anna May Wong Please!.......2007-06-22

A Fascinating Silent.......2006-03-03

I loved the film, but I hated the score........2005-08-01

Amazing!.......2005-07-29

Astonishing Expressionist British silent.......2005-06-03

Average customer rating:

Piccadilly Jim

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Product Description

Set in the 1930s, an American with a scandalous reputation on both sides of the Atlantic must do an about-face in order to win back the woman of his dreams.

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