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It got to the point where Anna May Wong couldn’t take it anymore. It was 1928, and the actress, known best today as the first bonafide Chinese-American movie star, decided she couldn’t stand to any longer hear which kinds of insultingly meager roles Hollywood gatekeepers were inclined to offer her despite the international fame she’d accrued since breaking through, at 17, as a woman named Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea (1922). (Not just notable for giving Wong her first leading role, the movie also was only the second film to ever use Technicolor.) Execs were generous with stereotypically conceived bit parts; parsimonious with the meaty leading roles her white peers would comparatively not have to try very hard to get; and most disposed anyway, as Wong remembers, to casting Native American and Mexican actors in Chinese roles. 

Wong figured she’d be better off leveraging her achievements in the European film industry than trying to make the nothings she was consistently offered in America into somethings. Her leap of faith was vindicated so obviously to anyone paying attention that the Hollywood she’d only just renounced managed to entice her back by 1930. Wong was promised better roles; she was also promised the lead billing she often deserved that tended to instead go to her less-deserving white co-stars. Increasingly excluded in mainstream cinema as a romantic lead on account of censorship of mixed-race couples on the one hand and a refusal to have a project anchored by two romantic leads of color on the other, those promises only got so far. 

A fate not uncommon for the movies made during the silent era, the time when the actress ascended, not many of Wong’s films have endured as classics. One to largely shirk that destiny was 1929’s Piccadilly, made toward the beginning of her expat period. The movie triumphs as a straightforward testament to just how magnetic a performer Wong could be; it also germanely tussles with stardom’s relationship with late-1920s-era racial politics. 

In Piccadilly, Wong plays Shosho, a Chinese immigrant living in London’s Limehouse district. We first meet her at a low: getting caught and then fired for distracting her scullery coworkers by dancing on a table at her dishwashing job at a tony local nightclub. It won’t be long, though, before she’s remade, whisked into prominence when the club’s owner, Valentine (Jameson Thomas) — the man who also sacked her — proposes she become the club’s new act after the dancing duo that had once been its bread and butter splits up and leaves the business scrambling for a new attraction.

Jameson Thomas and Anna May Wong in Piccadilly.

Shosho is a sensation, all right — dubbed on the front page of one newspaper “The Chinese Dancing Wonder” and on another a “stroke of luck” for a business that had only recently seemed doomed — but becoming the talk of the town will beget too much trouble for her to relish long in the perks of financial stability. Some of that trouble comes from her boyfriend Jim (King Hou Chang), who becomes more jealous and resentful in tandem with the growth of her ego. More of it comes from the developing romantic feelings between her and Valentine. 

It’s already complicated when there’s that major a power imbalance in a relationship. But it’s another thing when mixed-race romance is so fraught — exemplified explicitly in a scene where a Black man is castigated by a white bar owner for attempting to dance with a white woman and implicitly by how, ahead of a climactic kiss between Wong and Thomas, the camera cuts away before their lips can meet — and when Valentine has a jealous girlfriend who isn’t merely a jealous girlfriend. Mabel (Gilda Gray) was also one-half of the dancing duo that the business used to make money off of. They broke up because of the relationship between her and Valentine, and business had sunk before Shosho got hired because Mabel as a solo act couldn’t cut it.

Shosho will not get a happy ending. A cynical read of the film might conclude that her fate is indirect, inexorable punishment for her hegemonic disruption. But a more generous one would see it as a warped, loose metaphor for the early-century entertainment industry’s treatment of performers of color, happy to capitalize on the “exotic” but less willing to let those exotic stars burn brightly than be put in their “place” once they threaten to. (Wong would battle this in different forms throughout her career.) Shosho doesn’t become a mere vessel for these ideas; she’s written by Arnold Bennett humanely rather than with the kind of pigeonholing Wong tried to avoid. Her agency is underscored — Shosho is adamant, for one, that she gets the final say on what she will wear on stage and what she will be performing — and so is her ambition, which the film respects even when it manifests in bursts of callousness. 

Watching Piccadilly, you get how Wong could see continued success after the film industry transitioned from silence into sound: her hypnotic performance is so much more naturalistic compared to the rest of the ensemble (itself good in any case) that it can at times feel like she’s time-traveled from a future where the dominant acting style wouldn’t be dependent on gesticular exaggeration to get a point across. Wong is now recognized more as a symbol than she was for the substance of her work; movies like Piccadilly highlight that the momentousness of her legend was commensurate with her talent.