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Certificate

1929

Black & White and tinted

Language(s): Silent with music

Published/distributed by BFI

ISBN/EAN: 5035673005798

Ratio 1.33:1

Region 2

Price: £19.56
(Including VAT at 15%)

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Piccadilly

Dupont, E.A.

One of the pinnacles of British silent cinema, Piccadilly is a sumptuous showbiz melodrama seething with sexual and racial tension. The Chinese-American screen goddess Anna May Wong stars as Shosho, a scullery maid in a fashionable London nightclub whose sensuous tabletop dance catches the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. She rises to become the toast of London and the object of his erotic obsession - to the bitter jealousy of Mabel, his former lover and star dancer (played by Ziegfeld Follies star Gilda Gray).

Piccadilly has now been beautifully restored by the BFI National Film & Television Archive, complete with amber and blue tinting copied from an original 1929 silent release print. The BFI also commissioned a new score from Neil Brand, internationally acclaimed as a master of improvised silent film accompaniment. Following its worldwide premiere at the New York Film Festival last autumn, Piccadilly received its UK premiere at the Barbican in March with the score performed live by Brand and some of the UK's leading jazz players.

This stylish evocation of Jazz Age London, directed by the German migr E A Dupont, boasts the dazzling cinematography of Werner Brandes and atmospheric sets by Alfred Junge - ranging from the opulent West End nightclub (actually filmed in Piccadilly's Caf de Paris) to seedy Limehouse. Charles Laughton has a cameo role, making one of his first screen appearances as a greedy nightclub diner.

Piccadilly was a star vehicle for Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American star and one of the first non-white actresses to gain international celebrity. Best known for her role as Marlene Dietrich's sultry sidekick in Shanghai Express, Wong's career was stymied by racial stereotyping. Until recently all but forgotten, she now seems poised for rediscovery. As her centenary approaches in 2005 she is the subject of three new biographies, as well as two forthcoming documentaries and recent retrospectives in New York and LA.

Extras
* Neil Brand on composing the new score
* Prologue from the sound version of the film
* Biographies of E A Dupont and Anna May Wong

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