Piccadilly (Tuonti)

One of the pinnacles of British silent cinema, Piccadilly is a sumptuous showbusiness melodrama seething with sexual and racial tension. Chinese-American screen goddess Anna May Wong stars as Shosho, a scullery maid in a fashionable London nightclub whose sensuous table-top dances catches the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. With her exotic dance routines she rises to become the toast of London and the object of Wilmot's erotic obsession - prompting the bitter jealousy of Mabel, his former lover and star dancer (played by Ziegfield Follies star Gilda Gray). Contemporary fears and temptations of miscegenation are played out through Wong as the subject of fatal passion.

This stylish evocation of Jazz Age London directed by German emigre E.A. Dupont boasts the dazzlingly fluid cinematography of Werner Brandes and atmospheric aets by Alfred Junge. Released in a restored print by the bfi National Film and Television Archive, with a newly commissioned score.