AT HOME

With Michael Hootman

PICCADILLY (BFI Blu-ray).

This prototypical showbiz melodrama is one of the last British silent films. It fuses German expressionism and a marvellously campy storyline with some deadly serious performances and it even manages to be a critique of racism – plus there’s an excellent cameo from a thenunknown Charles Laughton as a pernickety diner.

Club owner Valentine Wilmot is in a relationship with his star attraction Mabel (a luminous Gilda Gray). After Laughton complains about a dirty plate in the restaurant, Wilmot comes across Shosho (the charismatic Anna May Wong) dancing in the scullery. With revenue falling an ‘exotic’ dancer may be the thing to rescue his club, and perhaps it’s also time for Wilmot to get a new girlfriend.

The sets and photography are astonishing, and because of its late date the film eschews the over-the-top acting style that was prevalent in most silent movies, opting for the most part for something more naturalistic.

There’s a great scene where Wilmot and Shosho visit an East End pub and a white girl dancing with a black man elicits some ugly behaviour from the locals – though it’s interesting that Wilmot and Shosho seem to not to attract this kind of unpleasant interest.

Piccadilly also has an excellent jazz-infused score from Neil Brand which, while it never exactly takes a back seat, certainly enhances the whole experience.

THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (homecinema.curzon.com).

This bleak psychodrama opens with David (Clayne Crawford) contemplating killing his wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) and her new boyfriend with a gun. Although we’re introduced to David as some kind of psychopath, the film reveals him to be a basically decent person and a good father.

Similarly his wife is manifestly a decent person too. Interestingly, some reviewers see her character as coming off the worse, though even the time she apologises about her behaviour I couldn’t have explained exactly why she was in the wrong.

The film has an almost continual threat of violence hanging in the air – this is aided by a weird soundtrack which takes the form of sounds of gunshot and strange mechanical noises which sound like instruments of torture.

Violence does happen but it comes from a completely unexpected quarter and adds further questions in itself. The performances are all absolutely convincing – some improvised scenes with the couple’s kids are not only brilliant, they also help reduce the weight of dread which hangs over most of the movie.

It’s as ambiguous and perhaps divisive a work as something like David Mamet’s Oleanna but it would be hard to deny it’s a great example of modern American cinema.

PLAY FOR TODAY: VOL 2 (BFI Blu-ray).

Probably the most famous play of the six in this boxed set is Jim Allen’s The Spongers – its provocative title card alone (the play’s name with a picture of the Queen and Prince Philip) guarantees it a place in TV history.

It’s set against the backdrop of the Silver Jubilee and focuses on Pauline (Christine Hargreaves) negotiating the vagaries of the benefits system. It has a great documentary feel which is perhaps down to director Roland Joffe getting his actors to improvise.

I felt the melodramatic ending overstates the case and The Spongers would be more powerful without it, but I may be in a minority on this. Despite being full of jokes I didn’t understand, The Elephants’ Graveyard succeeds on its charm and its underplayed supernatural underpinning.

Two idlers, played by Billy Connolly and Jon Morrison, meet by chance in the woods and develop a rapport based on perhaps having a number of shared experiences. The same writer’s Just a Boys’ Game is a masterpiece: set on the same council estates as The Spongers or any number of Ken Loach films, its lack of didacticism instantly sets it apart from other gritty kitchen-sinkers.

Frankie Miller plays Jake McQuillan, who lives with his dying extough guy grandfather, a man he holds equally in contempt and awe. Jake bunks off work with his mate Dancer, drinks and gets into fights.

It’s sort of a mini-Western played out in Scotland – the final line is as funny as it is horrible and makes for a perfect end. Other plays look at the anti-apartheid movement in England, how decent individuals can commit barbarous acts when following orders even in England and an education double-bill features two teachers held hostage by an unbalanced pupil.