Piccadilly and Emil Jannings.
Piccadilly's story is simple?though not quite. It's a backstage melodrama set at a London nightclub, following the performers (a dance team played by Gilda Gray and Cyril Ritchard), the service staff (including a scullery maid played by Anna May Wong) and the Piccadilly Club's devious owner (played by Jameson Thomas) as they go through professional and romantic competition. Dupont expands screenwriter Arnold Bennett's premise into a fascination with sexual and racial tension. Few of these issues are declared outright in the intertitles that provide dialogue, but the visual style itself conveys these dynamics with compelling obsessiveness. (Piccadilly was made a couple years after sound movies were introduced; it's infatuated with pictures.)
Every setting (the club's massive dance floor surrounded by banks of tables, the chaotic kitchen or the foggy Limehouse district); every object (a bobble-head ivory buddha, a dark, spacious sedan); and every character on screen is not just photographed, but showcased. London's nightworld seems to brim with mysterious possibility.
Good silent movies give a sense of the world seen fresh, partly through filmmakers' awe with the then-new medium's capacity for rendering life on the big screen. Although Dupont tells a conventional story, he doesn't approach it that way, which means the audience responds to his enraptured imagery with their own excitation. By now we've seen so many movies and tv shows that nothing shocks or surprises. (Surely the reason people show gratitude rather than amazement toward the Lord of the Rings trilogy is because its images are essentially familiar and obvious?second-rate "wonder.") Today's cgi cliches are simply the result of unimaginative storytelling; they reveal modern filmmakers' inability to create images that communicate the significance, the marvel, of common people in credible situations.
None of the backstage intrigue in Piccadilly is more shocking than what happens in, say, Chicago. But Dupont didn't share Rob Marshall's (or Bob Fosse's) cynical satisfaction with human corruption. When the club's owner, Valentine Wilmot, decides to fire one half of the dancing team in order to keep the woman, Gilda Gray's Mabel, to himself, Dupont shows the full egotism of the decision and the self-interest it ignites all around. The phenomenon of human behavior is Dupont's camera subject; the sordid lives of show folk is his great theme (as in his best-known film, the 1925 circus-set Variety).
Despite its simplicity, Piccadilly shows a greater sophistication than the dishonest, post-modern pretense of Chicago. Through Dupont's forward-tracking camera and abrupt sideways shifts, there is a wide-eyed exploration of the nightclub milieu. He looks eagerly into the background happenings, the idiosyncratic behavior. Moving from the club's dressing rooms to the dance floor, from the kitchen to the scullery, reveals the full strata of employment and class divisions. This is what a film version of Down and Out in Paris and London should look like. Dupont combines Orwellian social observation with a pop storyteller's interest in sexual allure.
As Valentine Wilmot walks through the club, dressing down his staff, he notices the maid Shosho (Wong) dancing instead of working. ("Just imagine the whole place being upset by a little Chinese girl in the scullery," Mabel scoffs.) After berating his workers, exercising his domination and lust, Wilmot hires Shosho to replace Mabel on stage and in his bed. Here, Dupont's melodramatic flair increases. He depicts his characters' erotic wiles and emotional machinations with a clarity and intensity that rivals Sternberg. (Mabel's laughing fit at the prospect of Shosho's success is an extraordinary neurotic display.) And like Sternberg, Dupont places importance on sexual behavior as the key to his characters' moral dilemmas. The triangle between Wilmot, Mabel and Shosho exposes the social customs of London's demimonde and the racial presumptions of the pre-Depression West.
Piccadilly's frankness and depth shame the love triangle of a shallow new movie like Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!. In fact, Piccadilly still seems modern through its implication of how sex and race, commerce and salaciousness are intertwined in the showbiz realm. When Shosho debuts her exotic dance, she becomes a media sensation. ("Shosho the Chinese Dancing Wonder!" newspaper headlines announce.) This tawdry fact of the jazz age seems ironically similar to the present, especially when the bizarre love triangle backstage leads to a murder trial that is as much a public sensation as Shosho's performance. All the issues we think of as Court TV fodder are here on dazzling display.
The revival of Piccadilly coincides with contemporary interest in Anna May Wong (currently the subject of a new biography and museum exhibit). Wong's rediscovery makes a point of her disadvantages and neglect due to Europe and America's early 20th-century racial prejudices. However, given Dupont's sexual and ethnic sophistication, it's doubtful Wong could have been presented more candidly or honestly than in Piccadilly. Her role as Shosho recalls some of Josephine Baker's roles in the French film industry that utilized a non-white actress' exoticism as a focus on the culture's biases.
In Piccadilly, Shosho is circumscribed, but Wong is not. Her success?and her beauty?clearly overwhelms the nightclub stardom of Gray's Caucasian Mabel. Dupont doesn't place a value on Shosho's exoticism so much as reveal its currency in the Western marketplace. Shosho is able to seduce Wilmot simply by exposing the runs in her stockings. When Wilmot goes to the Limehouse district to buy a costume for Shosho's performance, his attempt to maneuver the Chinese merchants gets reversed when Shosho and her Chinese cohorts participate in the dealmaking with equal aggression and savvy. (Imagine a double bill of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms and the subtle display of ethnic parity in Piccadilly. It'd be a mind-blowing demonstration of silent-era political sophistication.)
It's flattering to think that earlier eras lacked our superior taste and understanding?but wrong. Maybe Wong's archivists are embarrassed by the complexity of a character like Shosho who, on her climb up the social ladder, loses the totem her Chinese boyfriend gives her. ("I'm late because I'd lost my mascot and I've been looking everywhere for it," she lies.) Piccadilly remains a remarkable document of its times in the sly way Shosho's ambition intersects the amorality of the other characters. There's an unusual scene when Shosho and Wilmot go out on the town and witness an interracial dance between a black man and white reveler who may, in fact, be a drag queen. As the dance-hall manager raises hell, Shosho turns her back rather than watch the ugly scene. There's a world of indifference, shame, cowardice?even anger?to be read in that refusal. None of those emotions are more serious than what Dupont has prepared a viewer to appreciate. He sees right past exoticism?or rather, sees through it to everyone's basic human qualities. Unlike Chicago, Piccadilly shows a world in which human deprivation has an impact. It's not trivialized as entertainment.
Those lucky enough to have attended Film Forum's Josef von Sternberg retrospective got to see Emil Jannings give the first Oscar-winning turn in the thrilling silent film The Last Command. Jannings portrayed a former Russian general who, after the Revolution, comes to the U.S. as one of the destitute and dispossessed. He winds up recreating the Revolution?yearning for Mother Russia's lost glory?in a completely contrived Hollywood historical epic directed by an opportunistic Bolshevik actor now turned movie director.
No actor suffered on screen like Jannings. His capacity for showing a burly man's sensitive feelings, palpable hurt (and glamorous virility, under Sternberg's guidance) made him a phenomenon unmatched until Gerard Depardieu in the 90s. Jannings, who also acted for Ernst Lubitsch and in Dupont's Variety, was celebrated in his prime and scandalized afterward. (Once accused of being a Nazi because he stayed in Germany and worked in Goebbels' film industry, he was later exonerated.) The memorable characterizations of this remarkable actor are reason enough to check out Kino's just released Murnau DVD collection.
Murnau was one of the greatest silent era filmmakers, best known for his first American production Sunrise, but Kino has restored five of his lesser-known but magnificent films: The vampire classic Nosferatu; the ethnographic collaboration with Robert Flaherty, Tabu; and a trilogy of sorts starring Jannings?Faust, Tartuffe and The Last Laugh. I don't underestimate Murnau's genius?that's the reason these films still live. (Each one is evocative and visionary in ways that defined the cinema.) But a key aspect of Murnau's Expressionism is its human scale; the fine shadings and bold extravagance that Jannings brought to his roles as Moliere's Tartuffe, Goethe's Satan and the aging doorman he made unforgettable in The Last Laugh.
The Last Laugh (1924) combined Expressionist emotional power with a social-humanist tale. It was the first of Jannings' legendary masochist roles, followed by his pinnacle collaborations with Sternberg, The Last Command (1928) and The Blue Angel (1930). But Jannings' Murnau films prove actors can also be artists?a lost value in our celebrity-as-monster era.