Erotic and Exotic Cinematic Dance

"Piccadilly" is a shiny, art deco, late silent visual delight. It's a glistening, gorgeous picture from pictorialist E.A. Dupont. Whatever they did for the restoration, bravo. I'd like to know what the original sound re-issue score sounded like, but Neil Brand's modern addition is certainly effectively moody and maybe makes this silent film sound more like a nightclub proto-noir rise-and-fall saga than it already was. I suspect the original intent was more Jazz Age flapper mixed with miscegenation melodrama. Anna May Wong completely steals the show just as her dancer character, Shosho, does in the story.

Predictably and unfortunately, though, from an author, Arnold Bennett, that Virginia Woolf (according to Imogen Sara Smith's review) cited for representing "pre-modernist conventionality," the screenplay's orientalism ends as one might expect in an ugly whitewashing, yellow-peril claptrap courtroom drama befitting of the racialized othering of something such as Cecil B. DeMille's "The Cheat" (1915). To compensate for Shosho's vampish or femme fatale power over the white couple, there's also a desexualized or feminized oriental male stereotype, Jim, otherwise referred to in the film as "the Chinese boy," and the white woman, Mabel, is required to faint twice to restore a supposed feminine lack of agency. Wong's performance is so strong, though, that "Piccadilly" is best enjoyed when she's undermining or knowingly playing into such racial, gender, and class tropes. (And, to get the question out of the way that I'm sure is on everyone's mind looking at that poster: no, Wong doesn't appear topless in the film, although Gilda Gray, as Mabel, wears one form-fitting gown that's practically see-through, and the women's costumes overall play a thematic role.)

One may tell this is something visually spectacular from the get-go. Even the credits are striking, plastered as they are on trolleybus signage as part of the picture's splendid street décor. London brought to you from inside a movie studio. Surely coincidentally, some of the earliest standout achievements in studio lighting in the trend away from the prior tendency for natural lighting occurred in orientalist cinema, namely "The Cheat" and D.W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms" (1919). The latter is where I believe that bokeh effect that's impressively on display in "Piccadilly" was developed by Hendrik Sartov, or at least it's one of the earliest famous examples. The shadows through rice paper curtains is very akin to the work of cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff and art director Wilfred Buckland on "The Cheat." Seems along with Dupont, the cinematographer and art director on this one were recruited from Germany, as was a lot of talent in UK productions at the time thanks to government subsidies to make the native film industry competitive.

Wong came by way of Germany, too, despite being a Chinese-American from Los Angeles. Presumably, Germany is where she adopted the bobbed hair from fellow American expat and fellow flapper icon Louise Brooks. It shows you how racist the U.S. was at the time, that she left home for a country that would be run by Nazis in only a few years time and popping over to England to try her best to sabotage the othering message of films such as "Piccadilly." Reportedly, she was especially upset that her kiss here with the white leading man was cut to appease American censors. That disavowal discredits any potential noble critique behind the preceding scene at a Limehouse bar where a black man and a white woman are kicked out for dancing together--the film doing essentially the same thing by flirting with but ultimately excising the supposed threat of miscegenation. Film histories tend to focus on European emigration to Hollywood, but other American racial minorities, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, likewise set sail for Europe over the years--and later, as well, leftists escaping J. Edgar Hoover's right-wing anti-communist witch hunts, but I digress. If the Oscars mattered and actually awarded silent films or non-Hollywood films at the time, Wong's performance is the sort that would've been nominated. Also, check out pre-stardom Charles Laughton as a disruptive patron in an early bit part stealing the show first from Mabel's dancing (poor Gray, upstaged twice over, fainting twice over, too, and for an annoyingly jealous and probably a bit of a racist character).

So much of this picture is so glamorous it's hard to highlight specific moments. It's almost all blue-filtered highlights. Even a doorknob shines. I love the mirror shots at the beginning, the tracking shots following figures from behind, just a lot of nice little camera moves in conjunction with sharp continuity editing, good match cuts and reverse angles, some picturesque foregrounding, and the lighting just reflects sparkles everywhere. One aspect I think is especially effective, though, are the shots and continuity based on looks. This is where Wong is most effective, fully in control of the gaze, commandingly switching between the one looking and the one knowingly to be looked at.

Researcher Yumin Li in her essay on the film makes an especially interesting comparison between the Shosho's dance scene and the earlier duet between Mabel and Victor. The latter is the the more professional routine, which is further reflected in the camerawork that becomes part of the dance--the dolly movements, editing, even a tour-de-force 360-degrees revolving camera shot, and the camera repeatedly pans down to the toe tapping or otherwise focuses on specific body parts of the dancers to illustrate the skill of their performances. Yet, this elaborate razzle-dazzle is undermined from the start by the dance couple's lack of sexual chemistry, then by Laughton's nearly immobile antics grabbing the attention of other restaurant patrons, the dirty dish of which we discover is due to the scullery being distracted by Shosho's first gyrations. Her dance for the restaurant crowd, too, is antithetical to that of Mabel and Victor: an unprofessional peacock dance deconstructed to its base erotic and exotic conflation exploiting orientalist notions of the Far East. While remaining a visual feast with disco-like lighting and soft-focus cinematography that provides a near-sighted concentration on Wong's body, she, by contrast, mostly stays in place, controlling the gaze while pandering to the racialized sexual perversity.

Too bad the film employs Jim as a counterweight to Shosho's racial and sexual agency, to embody, as Li says, "the characteristics of the 'oriental women." She even has him (cross)dress in her dance costume before later putting it on herself when not otherwise treating him as a servant. His lack of sexual potency is even underlined by a cigarette lighting scene where he's defeated by the white male lead, Valentine, lighting his match quicker than Jim can obsequiously provide one for him. "For in staging the 'oriental' man as sexually submissive, the figure of the white male could symbolically enhance the myth of his sexual power," Li says, and to fill the void left by Shosho crossing racial, gender, and class lines to seduce Valentine. No transgression of the classist white supremacist patriarchy goes unpunished in these things. The saving grace being that Shosho's transgressions are the fun part, that at the same time she's exposing racial and gender performativity on the dance floor and elsewhere, it reflexively points to the artificiality of the outer performance that is the film itself. Now, that's quite the cinematic dance.

Works Cited
Li, Yumin. "Shape Shifters: Racialized and Gendered Crossings in Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932)." Sexualities 23, no. 1–2 (2020): 170–200.

Smith, Imogen Sara. "Piccadilly." San Francisco Silent Film Festival website (2015). silentfilm.org/piccadilly/