They keep selling this movie based on anatomy Anna May Wong doesn't bare in the film: breasts back then, legs today.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

If you love love triangles, this is your movie. We get three of them, a triangle of love triangles:

1. The opening act: The dance team of Mabel Greenfield and Victor Smiles (Gilda Gray and Cyril Ritchard) is the talk of the town, but he likes her while she leans toward nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas). Eventually Vic acts an ass and gets the boot, so it’s just Mabel and Valentine.
2. The main event: Except Mabel w/o Vic isn’t drawing them, so Valentine hires scullery worker Shosho (Anna May Wong) to mesmerize the crowds with her dancing the way she’s mesmerized the dishwashers. She’s a hit, and increasingly Valentine leans away from Mabel toward her.
3. The crescendo: Except all this time, Shosho’s been with Jim (King Ho Chang), whom she increasingly treats as the help.

That’s why there’s a bit of a “Who shot J.R.?” vibe after Shosho is murdered. So many people could’ve done it. The only one we don’t suspect is Victor Smiles.

E.A. Dupont’s “Piccadilly” was a British International Pictures silent film released in June 1929, so it suffered from bad timing, since talkies were the rage. It was quickly re-released with a talking prologue, a score, and sound effects, but nah. It’s mostly known today for the star turn from Anna May Wong. She was a bit like Josephine Baker this way: She had to escape to Europe to become famous.

Yer know that’s not allowed
The opening credits are clever. On the titular street in London, double-decker buses roll by with the players:

If you’re wondering about Charles Laughton sandwiched between the two Chinese stars, this is only his fourth film and he’s barely in it. He plays a man eating voluminously in Valentine’s nightclub, prefiguring Terry Jones’ Mr. Creosote in “Meaning of Life,” whose loud complaints about a dirty plate turn attention away from Mabel’s dancing and toward him. And eventually toward Shosho.

I like how everyone passes the buck as Valentine investigates the dirty dish problem. “The restaurant is the restaurant,“ the restaurant manager tells him, ”and the kitchen is the kitchen.“ So he goes to the kitchen, where it becomes, “The kitchen is the kitchen, and the scullery is the scullery.” That’s where Valentine finds Shosho, dancing, and mesmerizing the dishwashers enough that dishes aren’t cleaned properly. She's canned. “Imagine,” he says to himself, “the whole place being upset by one little Chinese girl in the scullery.” Yes, imagine.

It's at this point he also fires Victor, Mabel dances solo, and the receipts fall off. So how can he get the crowd back again? We wait for the other shoe to drop. Shosho has even danced for him in his office upstairs, and he’s playing with a gift she left him, a small Buddha, when, finally, light bulb.

The job offer is filmed cleverly. In his office, Valentine is sketching Shosho, but the camera remains on her, and the intertitles are just her part of the dialogue:

• I don’t mind trying, sir, if you want me to.
• Oh no, sir. I’m sure I shouldn’t be frightened.
• I did dance once in public—in Limehouse. I live down there.
• They wouldn’t let me dance again, sir—there was trouble between two men—knives, policemen…

Limehouse is where she suggests he buy her costume, some silly Oriental headdress, for which Valentine is charged an arm and a leg. Is he getting took? To be honest, once we see her on stage, her dancing isn’t anything to write home about, just a lot of hand flutterings; but I guess it beats Mabel’s “drunken flapper,” and it’s a hit. To the consternation of Mabel and Jim. And the bigger she gets, the closer she gets to Valentine.

At one point, they go to a club together, where a white woman dances with a black man, and there’s a scene. “Yer know that’s not allowed in my place—dancing with a white girl!” he’s told. The woman is shamed, and Valentine and Shosho leave, suddenly realizing their predicament. (Which isn't quite the same, but onward.) She then invites him upstairs, where she presses close: “You are the first visitor to my new rooms.” He’s going to kiss her hand, she wants more, and … the camera cuts away. Because it’s kissing between different races? One assumes. Yer know that’s not allowed… We’re all part of the same hypocrisy, Senator.

Once he leaves, and once Mabel rushes in to beg Shosho to leave Valentine alone, we get some good catty dialogue:

Shosho: Oh, you want me to give you back what you couldn’t keep.
Mabel: I’m desperate! I love him. You don’t—and he doesn’t really love you. … He’s too old for you.
Shosho: He isn’t too old for me. ... But you’re too old for him.

Wow. At which point Mabel pulls a gun. At which point we get headlines about Shosho’s murder. But it’s Valentine who’s charged, since it was his gun.

During the trial, Jim takes the stand, and Valentine takes the stand, and he admits that it’s his gun. As he’s about to be sentenced, Mabel, veiled, makes an appearance and proclaims, “Not till you’ve heard me!” She admits she brought Valentine’s weapon to Shosho’s place. It was in her purse. And when she went to get a handkerchief, Shosho saw it, got a knife down from the wall, but she blanks on what happened next. She just remembers running down the street.

Asked if she forced her way into the apartment, she admits Jim let her in. That’s enough to turn everyone’s attention to Jim. “Where is the Chinese boy?” the Judge cries. “Either he or this witness is committing perjury!” Not really, but onward.

Anyway, yes, Jim is the murderer. They find him dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, lying beside his love, Shosho, in the mortuary.

The ending recalls the 1927 silent “Chicago.” Once acquitted, Valentine (and Mabel) cease mattering. Do we even see them on the courthouse steps? Instead, a guy buys a newspaper with the big inquest headline but turns to a back page and shouts, “I won a fiver on the three-thirty race!” His tossed cigarette is then picked up by a man with a sandwich board advertising the latest sensation, in case you haven't gotten the message yet:

“LIFE GOES ON”
To-night at 8:30
New show at THE SCALA

In a better world
It’s “All About Eve,” isn’t it, underlined, since our experience watching it mirrors the story. Eve may have trumped Margo in ”Eve" but Anne Baxter never trumped Bette Davis. I mean, good luck with that. But here, yes. Gilda Gray was a big deal in the 1920s, popularizing “the shimmy,” and starring in “Aloma of the South Seas” and “Devil Dancer,” among others. That’s why she’s top-billed. She’s the star. Until she isn’t.

Because Anna May Wong just pops. She’s believable and sexy in all of her character's iterations: from fun-time scullery gal to nightclub diva. With the former, you feel her boredom; with the latter, you feel her sensing her power. Some might worry she leans too close to a Dragon Lady caricature at the end, but it’s also just Catty 101. Mean girls know no race.

Gray’s real-life fall was swifter than Mabel’s. This was her second-to-last feature. Did she not translate to talkies? She was born Marianna Michalska in Krakow, Poland, so maybe it was the accent? Except her family moved to the states when she was young, so ... probably not? So maybe she aged out? By this point, she was mid-30s, old for a glamour queen, and maybe too associated with the 1920s, which didn’t sit right during the Great Depression. She did a short in 1931 (“He Was Her Man”) and in 1936 was seventh-billed in a Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonaldl romance, and that was it. Throughout, she had financial problems, health problems, man problems. She died of a heart attack in LA in 1959 while visiting a friend.

Jameson Thomas is probably best known for playing the fortune hunter Claudette Colbert leaves at the altar for Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” but increasingly his billings slipped and his credits went uncredited. He died young, too, from TB in 1939, age 50.

King Ho Chang? His first and second-to-last film. He was a London restauranteur. But he’s good. In a better world, he would’ve made more movies. 

In a better world, so would Anna May Wong. Before this, she’d become a star in Weimar Germany (“Wasted Love” and “City Butterfly”), and afterwards she hit the London stage; but while her roles in Hollywood went from supporting to starring, they were of a type: “Daughter of the Dragon,” “Tiger Bay,” “Java Head,” “Limehouse Blues.” Each of them seems to ask: Do we trust her? Do we love her? Will she and this pasty white dude live happily ever after? She deserved better.