Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Nuts4R2 Reviews EA Dupont's Piccadilly"

Piccadilly. 1929. UK. Directed by E.A. Dupont. BFI DVD. Region 2.

Okay then. Second post but first post proper.

Finally got around to rewatching this very welcome Christmas present, the silent movie Piccadilly starring Gilda Gray and Anna May Wong. A tale of jealousy and murder revolving around a night club (actually a restaurant) in London. Although the actual murder only takes place about 20 minutes before the end of the movie.

This is not a bad transfer of a slightly ropey print, although it has to be said that it’s in a very much restored state here. What doesn’t need restoring is the quality of the majority of the actors and actresses performances, which are great. Every time I watch a silent movie I get stuck into that old trap of expecting overly dramatic, showy displays of acting when most of the time, and Piccadilly is an example of this, the reality is that the acting is certainly not as “stagey” as a great many of the early talkies which had started debuting a couple of years before the release of this movie.

In this incarnation of Piccadilly, the film has been tinted, as it presumably was on its first run, in alternating shades of blue, yellow and pink with the only purely black and white sequences being short flashbacks during the courtroom sequence at the end of the picture. So that’s one of the good things about this restoration.

One of the bad things is, if the quality of the original opening certification is anything to compare to, that the intertitles have so obviously been recreated and placed back in. I don’t know who’s to blame but the amount of widows and orphans in the intertitles is extremely distracting and perhaps a reduction of such occurrences may have been what the movie doctor ordered. I don’t know if these annoying typographic barbs were in the original intertitles but I’d like to think they were and that this is an attempt to recreate these exactly... otherwise someone’s got a lot of explaining to do.

Another minor gripe with what is actually a superb DVD presentation is an annoying and newly commisionned score which does no favours to the power of some of the stunning visuals in this film... being perhaps a little to bland and, dare I say it, “out of place” for a movie such as this. I think I’d possibly recommend that people who are easily distracted by such things view the movie as “purely” a silent movie and turn the volume down on their TV.

That all being said... Piccadilly is a very entertaining movie for those who value the history of film and the evocation of a certain period of time in various locales of London which it attempts to capture.

There’s a lot to like in this movie and when you first fire it up the big surprise, to this viewer anyway, is a properly designed title sequence which consists of the credits of the movie as posters on the side of trams which make their way past the camera. An innovative example of title design from an age when the medium was less associated with it than it is now. Saul Bass would have been proud.

Another thing which might surprise viewers less accustomed to watching pre-talkies is the freedom of movement with the cinematography. Like most silent films, the camera is truly liberated to move and dolly and track along and there is a strong sense of camera movement in the first dance scene highlighting one of the characters which takes on almost Scorcese-like proportions. Unlike the early talkies which were pretty much static due to the technical difficulties of having to box up the cameras so the noise from them wouldn’t impact on the recording, the silent films of the times (and especially these later ones when silent films were almost completely eradicated) were getting very creative with the language of cinema and many critics of cinema at the time were very vocal and quick in their denouncement of talking cinema as the death of the form as a creative art.

Creative too are the various interesting shot set ups and some very interesting shot transitions. There’s a very Eisensteinian moment, for example, when a shot of a small statuette of a nodding buddha is juxtaposed with a minor character nodding his head in the following shot.

And of course, Anna May Wongs vamp like sexuality alone is worth taking a peek at this DVD for.

While there is much to recommend in the BFI DVD of Piccadilly I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to novices of the silent screen (a better place to start might be The Lost World, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or Nosferatu if you really want to get hooked) but I would certainly recommend putting it on your list if you’re familiar with the mood and tone of silent cinema and want something entertaining and worthy of study to wrap your eyes around.

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The Great Acting Blog: "Actors Need To Reclaim Acting - Lessons From EA Dupont's Piccadilly"

 

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EA Dupont's silent era masterpiece, Piccadilly, is set in a fashionable London nightclub, and is about an exotic dancer, played by Anna May Wong, whose routines lead her to become the toast of Jazz-Age London. She also becomes the erotic obssesion of the her boss Valentine Wilmot (played by Jameson Thomas), which in turn, pushes the nose of his former lover and star dancer, Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray), out of joint, all of which sets off a chain of events leading to tragedy. Piccadilly features some simply breathtaking cinematography, which your eyes will hardly believe, and if anyone is any doubt about the credentials of early British cinema, then they need not look any further than Dupont's film. Joyously, we are also treated to an early Charles Laughton performance, credited as “nightclub diner”, where he complains about a dirty plate. However, it was by the acting generally, that I was piqued – I would not be exaggerating to say that I have simply never seen so many masterful performances all in the same film.

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I could single out the sheer intensity of King Hou Chang, but that would be unfair to the provocative and piquant Anna May Wong, and to the grace and technical execellence of Thomas and Gray. The acting in this film is beautiful. The performances are made up of small moments possessed with a perfectly distilled meaning, serving a very precise purpose, and executed with a consummate control. In some respects, a silent film gives us a clearer view to the actor's work, similar to when watching a subtitled foreign film, because we don't have potential distraction of the sound of what the actors are saying, and which is particularly distracting when the actor speaks the lines falsly. Certainly in Piccadilly, some of the power of the performances would have been lost if we had been able to hear what the actors were saying – it was just such a rich experience observing their movements and facial expressions. As with all great performances, we are treated to witnessing the truth of the actor's personality, and that was no different in this film, where the honesty and lack of self-consciousness meant that the actors revealed themselves, made themselves vulnerable, which, in turn, rendered the film's love triangle truly heartbreaking – a human being defending their position with everything they've got, is indeed a powerful sight. In the end, the performances in Piccadilly attain the highest point in acting; they show us that the human face can be poetic.

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All of which left me confused. Surely the acting in silent cinema was no match for our all-dominant contemporary “naturalism”? Aren't pre-mid 20th century actors supposed to be false, “theatrical”, mechanical? And yet, Piccadilly, and other films from that era, have proved to be such rich viewing experiences, especially when compared to today's work, so much of which seems trivial, cynical, superficial and self-serving (I've found this to be even more the case in theatre). It's generally thought that acting changed around the middle of the last century, that what had gone on before that period was no longer acceptable - a new, apparently idealistic new generation of teachers and directors, ushered in a new modern era of “realism”. It's hard to see how acting has changed in that period, but what is certainly true is that actors have become completely dominated by directors, and subservient to teachers, even to the extent that the actor himself is marginalised within his own performance (eg – directors or teachers getting the acclaim for great work done by an actor). More broadly speaking, the stature of actors has diminished, with less of them now in control of companies, or even being perceived of as capable of running companies (would the establishment of an institution such as the National Theatre be put in an actors hands today?). Donald Wolfitt set up his own touring company because nobody would give him a chance to play Hamlet, and in early cinema, there was no director: the cinematographer took are of the pictures, and the actors took care of the acting. Could it be then, that there never was anything wrong with the way acting was done, but that it was attacked by directors and teachers in order to create the space for them to have careers, ie – directors and teachers shove actors off their own work, then take responsibility for it, and, voila!

 

Masterpieces like Piccadilly, show us that there never was anything wrong with the way acting was done, infact, there is strong evidence to suggest that perfromances were (and are) generally stronger when the actor left alone to get on with his work, in the best way he sees fit, taking responsibility for all aspects of it.

Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Anna May Wong in EA Dupont's Piccadilly"