Piccadilly (1929)

In 1929's Piccadilly, a nightclub dancer (Gilda Gray) in love with the club's owner (Jameson Thomas) while fending off the advances of her handsome dance partner (Cyril Ritchard). The club is packed every night, the men to leer at Gray, the women to lust over Ritchard, and a young Charles Laughton to slobber over the wine and a variety of fancy cheeses.

Into this mix comes a sensational new act — scullery maid turned dancer (Anna May Wong) — and overnight, what was once new is now old hat.

And that includes the boss's affections. He tracks Wong down to her room in back of a Chinese restaurant in Limehouse and the sparks fly.

I'd never heard of Gray or Ritchard, and I only knew Thomas as the "nose twitcher" in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but Wong was a veteran of both the silent and early sound eras, and this is one of her best performances. In a supporting role, she steals the movie, turning what at first plays like a dull backstage romance into a tragedy of race, class and social manners, with Wong and the owner not welcome in his world, not welcome in hers.

That a silent film should deal so frankly with such subject matter will come as a surprise to no one familiar with the medium. Motion pictures of the era were considered adult fare and frequently dealt with themes — adultery, abortion, homosexuality, racism — that would soon become verboten under 1934's Production Code.

Not until the 1960s would Hollywood again wade into the shark-infested waters of such mature topics, and (I would argue) tentatively at that.

Wong made a name for herself in 1922's The Toll of the Sea, Hollywood's first technicolor feature. Ten years later, she would more than hold her own against the legendary Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express.

But the racism of the era largely relegated her talent to minor parts in forgettable movies with lead roles going to the likes of Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy in "yellow face."

In fact, Irving Thalberg rejected Wong for the lead in The Good Earth — based on Pearl Buck's award-winning novel about Chinese peasants — because she didn't fit his idea of what a Chinese woman should look like. He opted to cast German-born Luise Rainer instead.

Ironically, Wong also found disfavor among Chinese-Americans for playing stereotypical Asians on screen.

Wong left Hollywood in the early '40s and passed away in 1961 at the age of 56.

In 2022, the United States Mint included Wong as part of its American Women Quarters Program, the first Asian-American so honored. The following year, Mattel created an Anna May Wong doll for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Fun note: For the opening credits, the producers slapped ads on the sides of double decker buses featuring the names of the movie, director, producer, writer, and stars. The opening credits literally drive past the camera through London's West End traffic.