Sorry, this movie sucks

Best movie ever!

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Blistering performances.

I don't know who the clothing designer was but Anna May Wong looked simply fabulous as the sinuous Oriental dancer, Shosho. It was ironic that Anna had to travel to England to be given a flesh and blood role that allowed her to give an in-depth characterization. Of course after this it was back to America where, apart from the title role in "Daughter of the Dragon", it was back to stereo typical Oriental temptress roles - and she even had to compete with Myrna Loy for a time. She was literally given the role of a lifetime in this superb film. Art direction by Alfred Junge has a very decadent 20s Art Nouveau look and the photography by Werner Brandes captures the high society of London's West End ("This Year of Grace" is playing) to the seedy cabaret life of "my Piccadilly" as Valentine says. Director E.A. Dupont can point to this as a career highlight in a mostly unsatisfactory career. Eventually ending up in Hollywood, the director of the magnificent "Varietie" and "Atlantic" was given directorial assignments of the calibre of "Ladies Must Love" and even "Hell's Kitchen" featuring the Dead End Kids. Initially going to Hollywood in 1927 after his triumph with "Varietie", he left in disappointment after being given a sentimental melodrama to direct. He went to England and set up his own distribution company - World Wide Pictures - "Photoplays Made Where the Story's Laid" and the first movie made was "Moulin Rouge". Even though it was filmed mostly at Elstree, it was a great success and for his next movie Dupont turned to an actual locale in London with Piccadilly. The film was based on a novel by Arnold Bennett and the author also supplied his own scenario.Vic and Mabel (Cyril Richard and Gilda Gray), the top dance act, are the talk of the town - so say the patrons of the Piccadilly Club. And what a club, with an inhouse orchestra of the DeBroy Somers Band (they were one of Britain's premier dance bands of the 20s, it was a pity some of their music couldn't have been incorporated into the soundtrack instead of the rather cheesy score). With a curved balcony and arched staircase overlooking a magnificent ballroom, the setting is super. Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) is the jaded manager (is there any other kind)??? - as one diner says he started the club and he made it!!!An incident involving a dirty plate (Charles Laughton has a cameo as a disgruntled customer) leads Valentine to the scullery where he discovers Shosho (Wong). Her tantalizing dancing on the tabletop distracts the dishwashers from their work so when Victor departs for America, hoping to leave the club in the lurch, Valentine brings in Shosho as his new dancing star. Mabel (who has a secret yen for Valentine) is horrified - "She can't dance, they'll laugh at her - and you!!" Of course Shosho is a sensation, her shimmering dance leaves the audience spellbound and Mabel distraught as she knows she will no longer be the toast of London!!!Valentine now begins an affair with Shosho - her "intended", Jim, is unhappy, he accidentally sees the mascot he gave her, a tiny Buddha, in Valentine's office - she said she lost it, but someone else is not quite pleased about it either!!! The sensational ending is soon yesterday's news as an excited tipster in more concerned with his race winnings than the sordid headlines and as the new variety show says "Life Goes On"!!!Jameson Thomas was dissatisfied with his career in British movies so went to Hollywood where he was continually cast as a villain or lounge lizard ("Extravagance", "It Happened One Night"). Gilda Gray had a patchy career - her private life was far more exciting but all her movies gave her a chance to dance the shimmy - the dance she made famous!!!

Devilishly debonair Valentine Wilmott (Jameson Thomas), a Ronald Colman type with pencil moustache and oil-slick hair, is the owner of Piccadilly, London's top nightspot, at which the glamorously-monickered dance team of Clive and Mabel (Cyrill Ritchard and the real-life queen of the shimmy, Gilda Gray) are the resident dance team. While Clive and Mabel might look the part, they're no Fred and Ginger, part of the reason perhaps being that Clive has a major case of the hots for Mabel, who only has eyes for suave Valentine. Things turn sour for Mabel, however, after Clive dissolves the partnership in a huff after she rebuffs his advances once too often, and then Valentine starts getting cosy with his new female dancer, the sultry Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong). Of course, it's only a matter of time before emotions come to the boil.Piccadilly is a movie about sex. It's about the interaction of adults, and the consequences of actions taken through selfish motives. While there are no real villains in this piece (even though there is a murder), nobody comes out of it untarnished by the events that unfold, although one character emerges surprisingly unchanged. For all its melodramatic tendencies (which are forgivable given the era in which it was made), Piccadilly is quite a remarkable film. Presaging film noir by more than a decade, German director E. A. Dupont's mobile camera makes wonderful use of light and shadow to illustrate the archetypal noir ambiance created by Arnold Bennett's account of the dark passions at play in the superficial environment of the swish Piccadilly nightclub. The camera sweeps across a limehouse saloon filled with rummies and whores with as much relish as it roams the nightclub crammed with bejewelled ladies in gowns and men in dinner suits. It is this rich canvas of sumptuously captured images that overcomes the shortfalls in acting and storyline to deliver a film that is really better than it ought to be. While there are some nice touches in the script – Wilmott, for instance, after watching Clive and Mabel's unconvincing dance performance, travels from club to kitchen to scullery, where he spies Sho-Sho performing a sultry shimmy on a worktop for the entertainment of her workmates, thus linking most of the protganists and depictng their relative social status in one economical and effective sequence – once Bennett has to concentrate on driving the storyline forward, he seems too willing to fall back on increasingly melodramatic plot points that must have been clichéd even back in '29.Although third-billed, Anna May Wong is far and away the star of this movie. Looking remarkably contemporary with her bobbed 'Louise Brooks' hair and her clever facial gestures, she steals every single scene in which she appears, and manages, with the help of one of the screenplay's other strong points, to present ShoSho as a femme fatale without making her out to be a ruthless schemer on the make. Gilda Gray, the star of the piece – although Thomas gets more screen-time than both of the ladies – gives a melodramatic performance by comparison. She looks a little like Garbo, but that's the only resemblance between them.The BFI DVD comes with an optional five-minute sound prologue that leaves the viewer thankful they are watching the silent version. The static camera shows Thomas and his co-actor speak their lines like Cholmondeley-Warner and pal in all those Harry Enfield sketches – evidence indeed that the cinema took a brief but major step backward with the advent of sound.

Don't believe the hype. "Picadilly" is visually splendid. The problem is that the pacing is so incredibly slow, it can give silents a bad name. Within a year, "The Last Command" and "Wind" were released. Those looking for a great film would be advised to see those, not this. I do admire Dupont's use of quick pans, tints, point-of-view shots and other directoral touches. But the script is lame. One example: the boss hires a fired dishwasher to be a star attraction without an audition, because he remembers seeing her dance briefly on a table. It seems to take forever to get to the few points it is trying to make. Example: Before the boss confronts the dishwasher, we see him accosting the waiter, the chef, and other bits of business before a story takes shape.

One of the last British silent films casts Gilda Gray and Anna May Wong as rivals for Jameson Thomas owner of the fabled Piccadilly nightclub located, where else but on Piccadilly Circus in London. Piccadilly is set in the heart of Jazz Age London which had everything the American Roaring Twenties had without the inconvenience of Prohibition.They were a little more daring across the pond in depicting an interracial romance. Thomas as owner of the nightclub fires half of his club attraction of the dancing team of Mabel and Vic. Vic is played by Cyril Ritchard and he's got a roving eye which distresses Mabel who is Gilda Gray. It distresses Thomas even more who likes Gilda, sort of.But when Gray as a solo act doesn't bring in the customers, Thomas looks for a replacement and finds it in the slinky, sexy, sultry Anna May Wong. Wong had previously worked in the scullery at the club and got fired when she did a little impromptu dance entertainment for the staff and a customer complained about a dirty plate. But Thomas and his hormones remembered Wong and they begin an association professional and later personal.This interracial triangle ends real bad with one of them dead and the other on trial for murder.Two prominent people who had great careers in film had small parts. You have to look quick to spot Ray Milland as one of the tuxedoed bits during the nightclub scene. But it's impossible to forget Charles Laughton in his screen debut. He's the diner who complains about the dirty plate he was given, spoiling Ritchard and Gray's dance and leading to Thomas's discovery of Wong. Even without Laughton's magnificent speaking voice to aid him, watch how he milks that simple scene for all its worth. No doubt this man was going to have a great career.There is one other prominent role of significance, that of King Hou Chang as Wong's original boy friend who carries a torch bigger than the one Jameson Thomas has. His performance is quite poignant, I'd love to know what happened to him as Piccadilly is only one of two film credits he has.There are some nice shots of London in the Stanley Baldwin-Ramsay MacDonald era incorporated into the film. Piccadilly holds up reasonably well with a plot quite a bit more mature than the era normally would countenance.