A star, reborn
Piccadilly's poisonous peony blossoms anew

HERALDED AS A marvel of cinematic sophistication in its day – and now, in a freshly restored version financed by the British Film Institute, ready for rediscovery by post-everything cine-sophisticates of all contemporary stripes – Piccadilly, director E.A. Dupont's 1929 masterpiece of racial discord and goose-bump shadow play, is more than just another rescued relic from the silver-nitrate swamp. This feverish potboiler about an English nightclub owner's fatal attraction to a mysterious siren from the exotic Far East struck audiences and critics at the time of its original release as a sort of ultramodern art film; viewers today may very well feel the same. That's because, as both a prefiguration of Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel and a kind of prehistoric variation on Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep, Piccadilly isn't just a superior piece of highbrow popcorn-marketing. It's a quintessential ur-example of one of European cinema's longest-standing impulses: a film as convinced of its own enlightenment about everything that's wrong in Hollywood as it is certain of its own ability to dialectically set things right.

The wrong the film was most eager to right was the American film industry's underutilization of actor Anna May Wong, whose star turn in Piccadilly helped secure her fleeting international position as a trend-and-fashion-setting cause célèbre and the intermittently flickering status she's enjoyed, as one of the silent screen's most venomous vamps, ever since. A once oh-so-brightly flaming creature destined, in unequal proportion, for everything from legendary triumphs (out-butching Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express) and midcareer B-film brilliances (as Fu Manchu's heir apparent in Daughter of the Dragon) to eventual obscurity and (in 1961) premature death, Wong is long overdue for latter-day rediscovery. Indeed, full discovery in her own day proved elusive enough, despite the actor's aptitude for self-reinvention and international relocation.

Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Wong became a photographer's model while still a student at Hollywood High and got her first gig in the movies by age 14; by 1928 she'd been featured opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad as a Mongolian slave girl and was getting regular if minor roles as various "flower of the Orient" types. At once capriciously bohemian and sexually dangerous, Wong's never fully tapped allure was manifold: her performances driven by rapid alternations between sidelong sneers and sullen down-gazing, her boyish body contradicted first by her dragon-lady fingernails and then again by bangs as bold Anna Karina's – she was both the jazz age's most poisonous peony and the prototypical Ghost World girl. At age 23, tired of her hometown limitations, Wong split for Europe, hoping for larger parts and more control over her career. She went first to Germany (where no less a kultur kritic than Walter Benjamin fell under her thrall) and then to England, where Piccadilly – in which Wong steals center stage as Shosho, a scullery maid turned nightclub dancing sensation who displaces an aging shimmy queen from both the titular nightspot's limelight and the affections of its owner, a man named Valentine – provided her first leading role.

Though little remembered today, Piccadilly's German-born director, Dupont, a contemporary of F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, enjoyed tremendous acclaim during his heyday and was celebrated in particular for his ability to fuse the dreadful darknesses of German expressionism with a flair for propulsive storytelling and seedy local detail. In Piccadilly Dupont manages to make of London's Limehouse district – home to the city's Chinese immigrant populace and locus of Shosho's incense-choked two-story walk-up – a Caligari's cabinet filled with malingerers, miscegenators, barfly floozies, and various other fist-faced riffraff. Tellingly, Sam Fuller was one of Dupont's disciples, and he'd later remember him as filmmaker who "wrote emotion" with his camera. "He will grip you!" Fuller went on to exclaim. "You can fight him – but he will grip you!"

Indeed, Piccadilly's most gripping episode, in which Shosho's pincer hold on Valentine's desires is detailed for the audience in the most lurid possible manner, is a throat-grabber of sublimely supercharged strangeness; even the censor's scissor-snip violation of the scene, at the last frame before the interracial couple's forbidden lip lock, seems as rude a sensation as the curdled intimacy Fuller once described as a "naked kiss." The interior of Wong's apartment – filled with a demented assortment of crudely inked scrolls, chintzy folding screens, and preposterous lamps – looks like the exploded inside of a Joseph Cornell box, its kitsch details supersized by radiation, or like a dime-store production of The Flowers of Shanghai set to premiere in Jack "Flaming Creatures" Smith's East Village living room. And Wong herself is so bizarrely hyperanimated in her seductions that one might think she was auditioning for a Peking Opera interpretation of Dracula's Daughter – those famous hands and their talonlike nails clawing the air as though it were thick with ropey cobwebs, and her capricious eyes as lunatic-wide as Bela Lugosi's might have been, were he locked in a crypt, desperately jonesing for a long overdue hypodermic of morphine. Even nature conspires in the moment's madness, as when, in one of the scene's sultriest shots, a large fly poetically alights on the starlet's erotically outstretched arm.

The resurrection of Piccadilly is welcome for a variety of reasons, chief among them its contribution to Wong's current rediscovery, and in visual and narrative terms, it's a thrilling piece of work. The restoration opening next week at the Castro Theatre, however, is not without its flaws: particularly egregious is Neil Brand's heavily processed and utterly anachronistic pseudo-jazz score, a nitwit's idea of noirish filigree that practically screams out, "Shoot the electric piano player." Perspicaciously, NAATA has commissioned a replacement score by composer Jon Jang for its special presentation this week. Still, the touring version of the film remains a must-see, even if it begs you to close your ears and listen with your eyes: as one character admits of Wong's Piccadilly fatale, "Her smile is opium." Better late than never, it's time we all inhaled. (Chuck Stephens)

'Piccadilly' plays the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival with a live score, newly composed by Jon Jang, Sun/7, 6 p.m., Castro Theatre. It continues with the above-mentioned Neil Brand score March 8-11. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times. For more festival information, see box, page 32, or First Runs, in Film listings.