E-Mail This Article to a Friend Righting Wong The Brattle gives us a restored Piccadilly BY GERALD PEARY

Piccadilly, the fascinating 1929 British pre-talkie at the Brattle this weekend, is playing for the first time in America in 75 years. Who remembers it? Although directed by Germany’s E.A. Dupont, who’s renowned for the 1925 expressionist classic Variety, this backstage melodrama isn’t referred to anywhere that I can discover in film-history texts. So cheers to those at the British Film Institute who deemed it worthwhile to restore the movie in a lovely, shiny tinted print. Screened first at the 2003 New York Film Festival, and with an added musical soundtrack, Piccadilly is now finding its way across the USA, and making fans everywhere.

The first reels of the film are only moderately interesting, setting up a romantic rivalry between a top-hatted cabaret dancer, Victor Smiles (Cyril Ritchard, a skinny Astaire type though without hoofing talent), and a slick, world-weary club owner, Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas, effective behind his perfect moustache). The object of their desire is Victor’s hot-blooded dance partner, Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray, a young-Dietrich butterball). Piccadilly does what it can as a non-talkie musical. Club patrons dance, an orchestra feigns playing to the vintage-sound soundtrack, and the team of Victor and Mabel kick up their heels but don’t sing. The story? Wilmot fires Victor for putting his paws on the unwilling Mabel. The spurned Victor says he’s taking his act to the USA. Cheerio, Victor.

Here’s how Piccadilly heats up: one of Wilmot’s customers (a Charles Laughton cameo) complains about a dirty plate. Wilmot heads into the bowels of his club to find the culprit. Soon he’s in Chinatown, among Asian scullery employees; and one of them, a young woman named Sho-Sho, opts, instead of washing dishes, to dance on a table. It’s the incredible actress Anna May Wong, sprung loose in all her primal sexuality. Piccadilly shivers when Wong makes her extraordinary torn-stockings entrance; sashaying her loins about, she predates Brando’s Stanley Kowalski with his ripped undershirt.

Piccadilly’s return celebrates Wong as the first Asian-American film star. Born in 1905 in LA, the daughter of a Chinese launderer, she went into show business over the objections of her traditionalist father. At 17, she starred in The Toll of the Sea, the first two-colored Technicolor film, in which she played the Madame Butterfly–like Lotus Flower, who rescues an American from the sea and has his illegitimate child. Surprise: regular Americans thought her inscrutable. In 1926, she wrote, "A lot of people when they first meet me are surprised that I speak and write English without difficulty. But why shouldn’t I? I was born right here in Los Angeles." Surprise: Wong found her parts confining and stereotyped. Asian suffering and more suffering. After 1928, she looked to England and Germany for roles. "I think I left Hollywood," she later recalled, "because . . . I was killed in virtually every picture in which I appeared."

In 1931, she was back in LA, contracted to Paramount. In 1932, she made perhaps her coolest film, Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, in which she rode the rails with sultry Marlene Dietrich. And this is the great rumor about the never-married Wong: she and Marlene had a tryst. Neat! There were more stereotyped roles, though sometimes fun ones, such as the dastardly daughter of the evil Fu Manchu in Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and the mistress of an LA gangster in Dangerous To Know (1938). The 1940s were downhill, as she got only small roles in "B" and "C" movies.

In 1951, she became the first Asian-American featured in a TV series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong. In cinema? She finished as Lana Turner’s Chinese maid in Portrait in Black (1960), among the least of her 54 film roles. She died in 1961, of complications caused by alcoholism.

And back in Piccadilly? Promoted from the kitchen to be a star solo performer, Wong’s Sho-Sho does this slow, slinky, refreshingly amateur dance that brings the club denizens to their feet. Also, she sweeps away Wilmot, who suddenly has eyes only for his China girl from the slum Limehouse district. And Mabel? Madly jealous of Sho-Sho, she’s a loser in show biz, a loser in love. Piccadilly ends with a murder trial, and with a "surprise" killer in the tiresome fashion of musty Victorian crime novels. But so what? The movie has given us ample screen time with the marvelous Anna May Wong.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com