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.
