Piccadilly

As a disclaimer, I've taken the Silent to Sound film studies class, so I'm familiar with silent films, and generally like them. But for some reason I found Piccadilly intensely boring. The problem, I think, was that I was comparing it all along to another film from the same year, Pandora's Box. Pandora's Box is a German silent film about a dancer whose uncontrollable sexiness leads to despair, death, and her own eventual murder by Jack the Ripper. Lulu, as played by Louise Brooks, is part free-wheeling innocent, part scheming seductress, and it's her performance that makes the film what it is. Interestingly in relation to Piccadilly, Brooks popularised the bubikopf - the short, sharp bob haircut Anna May Wong's hair imitates in this film.

Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box.

What I like most about Pandora's Box is the unabashed joy Louise Brooks/Lulu has in her own seductive powers. She loves people, and she loves to be loved. The film is set in Berlin at a time when the city was known for its hedonistic, avant garde, and sexually open artistic sphere. The musical/film Cabaret romps through this world, showing its final days prior to the rise of fascism in Germany. German films of the Weimar era drew on a futuristic aesthetic, a kind of hyperactive art deco, and while Pandora's Box isn't as abstract in its design as films by directors such as Fritz Lang, it still has that grand, modern style. The fashion and hairstyles, as well as what is regarded as the first depiction of a lesbian in film, make Pandora's Box ahead of its time when compared to American films of the same era. Released about six months before Piccadilly (in Germany) I feel that Pandora's Box is doing a similar thing in a more interesting way.

Vic, Mabel and Shosho in Piccadilly.

 I suppose it depends what you see Piccadilly as attempting to do, but if the moral is one read along gendered lines (assuming there is some sort of moral, and ignoring the racial aspect) both films seem to have a message about women who are commodities (performers, in particular) attempting to turn their commodity status into a kind of purchasing power of their own. Lulu, Mabel and Shosho's lives go awry (or end) when they misinterpret their commodity value as power and try to wrangle themselves stable positions as the wives of the men who employ and exploit them, rather than settling for their appropriate partners; other employees. Mabel should go with Victor, who is the real attraction in their partnership. Shosho should stick with Jim, her equal in race and class. In Pandora's Box, Lulu toys with the son of her... the man she is the mistress of (you can't exactly say 'master', can you? But there isn't a name for it! You can be a concubine, but not a concubiner, a mistress, but not a master), before marrying the father. Lulu attains a bit of a coup here, stealing her man-she-is-the-mistress-of (who also backs the shows she dances in) back from his (wealthy, sophisticated) fiancee by throwing a screaming tantrum (see top two images above). After the wedding, her husband finds her with his son's head in her lap, and attacks her. In the ensuing tousle he is killed, and Lulu faces prison. From there it gets rather messy. The lesson for Lulu is that she has overplayed her hand in trying for the father rather than settling for the son, who is more her equal.

I would say Shosho is Lulu's parallel in Piccadilly, and while I don't know that Piccadilly could feasibly have been influenced by Pandora's Box the thematic similarities are notable, as are the physical similarities between Anna May Wong and Louise Brooks, in their hair and their small, slim body types. Next to the curvaceous and handsomely feathered and upholstered Mabel, Shosho looks tiny, and very young. Lulu and Shosho, young, slim, often near-naked, with their hair close about their heads, are indicative of a new type of femininity. The New Woman is androgynous, free spirited, alluring and flirtatious. The kind of slang recorded in this 'Flapper's dictionary' indicates something about the attitude of this type of young woman in the 1920's. To my mind, while Lulu still ends up murdered in an icy London garret, Pandora's Box seems to offer a more forward-looking view on this trend in its more thorough exploration of Lulu's character. Shosho is less sympathetic largely because we don't see enough of her. I found Piccadilly less interesting because I didn't care for any of the characters in the same way I cared about Lulu. Piccadilly's view on the New Woman seems particularly grim, with none of Lulu's joy.