Milestone: Dragon Painter

[drdoros]

Just want to mention that our long-awaited release of DRAGON PAINTER starring Sessue Hayakawa is coming out on DVD in March 18.

Bonus features include

- The full-length feature, Thomas Ince's The Wrath of the Gods (1914. 60 minutes.), starring Sessue Hayakawa, Tsuru Aoki and Frank Borzage. - Restored tinted print courtesy of George Eastman House.
- Score by Marco Lienhard.
- How to build your own volcano

[HerrSchreck]

Solid! Thanks for the update Dennis.

[justeleblanc]

Great news indeed. I assume this will also be through New Yorker?

And drdoros, can we see a list of all the titles in the Milestone library?

[Danny Burk]

Good news, Dennis. Mine will be on preorder.

[drdoros]

And drdoros, can we see a list of all the titles in the Milestone library?

Our website has everything. We'll have a new site and new catalog coming in the Spring.

Dragon Painter will be through New Yorker since we're just too small to get to the major sellers (or deal with collections, ad deadlines, etc.), but you can always buy directly from us and get DVDs (usually) a few weeks before release date.

Dennis
Milestone Film & Video

[Keaton]

Hi,

Great news, thanks!

regards,

Dennis

[the dancing kid]

Great news! Will Daisuke Miyao be involved with the release? He's been doing a lot of lectures on Hayakawa around the country recently. His book on the actor was also published this year.

[drdoros]

Great news! Will Daisuke Miyao be involved with the release? He's been doing a lot of lectures on Hayakawa around the country recently. His book on the actor was also published this year.

Daisuke was in at the beginning of the production and a chapter from his "unpublished" book was planned as part of the package, but since it took so long for us to come out with the dvd and during that time his book DID came out, he didn't seem necessary any more.

Dennis

[Scharphedin2]

I posted a few more comments in the Milestone thread, but here is news concerning the release of The Dragon Painter.

I am very happy to announce that the long-awaited release of Sessue (The Bridge on the River Kwai) Hayakawa's silent masterpiece, THE DRAGON PAINTER. And of course, being Milestone, we have bonus features for the bonus features including another extremely rare Hayakawa feature (produced by the legendary Thomas Ince!) THE WRATH OF THE GODS, still galleries, scripts, press kits and more!

The dvds are now in at Milestone. Although it's not available elsewhere until March 18, you can order it directly from the website -- http://milestonefilms.com/movie.php/dragon/ You get a 20% discount and we will be shipping them immediately. Be the first on your block!

[fiddlesticks]

Milestone is now shipping orders of The Dragon Painter for anyone who would like to get the film, before it officially streets.

I just want to say that I was inspired to order this, along with two other titles to negate the shipping, and placed my order in the evening of Thursday last. This morning (Monday) I am sitting here caressing all three. =D> After a series of bad experiences with etailers like Bensonsworld and CD-Wow, I may just stick with ordering from the source (I also receive outstanding service ordering directly from Second Run.) Thanks, Dennis!

(Only drawback was that I couldn't get on the mailing list, as the form kept returning some cryptic error, but evidently I can do so via postcard that was included with The Dragon Painter, so all's well.)

[carax09]

Fiddlesticks, please let us know what you thought of Dragon Painter, as it seems difficult to find reviews anywhere...

[drdoros]

Fiddlesticks, please let us know what you thought of Dragon Painter, as it seems difficult to find reviews anywhere...

Well, that's because the DVDs just went out to the press last week. Fulvue Drive-In has a review out today and Kevin Brownlow wrote me today what he thought since he got the first copy. I expect there'll be lots more.

Dennis

[Michael Kerpan]

Well, that's because the DVDs just went out to the press last week. Fulvue Drive-In has a review out today and Kevin Brownlow wrote me today what he thought since he got the first copy. I expect there'll be lots more.

Fulvue Drive-In's review

[zone_resident]

Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B- Film: B-
Milestone delivers once again.

I don't know what the newly restored Faust or Battleship Potemkin would get. B- ?

[Michael Kerpan]

Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B- Film: B-
Milestone delivers once again.

I don't know what the newly restored Faust or Battleship Potemkin would get. B- ?

Since the textual description is actually quite positive, I assume their rating baseline is a well-made DVD of recent vintage. So even a nicely done restoration of a very old film would never come close to an A.

[fiddlesticks]

Hmmm. I was hoping to get out from under this assignment by relying on the Fulvue review, but I can't quite figure out what it is trying to say. It never occurred to me to compare The Dragon Painter to a 21st century digital video production, much less to Kill Bill. But, I'm not a professional reviewer, so what do I know.

I think this is a terrific DVD, very much worth the money. The main feature has its strengths and weaknesses, but there's so much more: an interesting second feature (The Wrath of the Gods), a delightful short with Hayakawa and Fatty Arbuckle, a large gallery of turn-of-that-century photos of Japan from Herbert G. Pointing, and lots of PDF stuff I haven't investigated yet.

The Dragon Painter is beautifully shot, with exteriors from Yosemite standing in for Japan. It's wonderful to see images of Upper Yosemite Falls and the Merced River from nearly a century ago. (Early on, the title character encounters a surveyor in the Valley, and I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like to be there with surveyors instead of their highways and subsequent tourist hordes. Anyway...) The story plays as a fable-cum-Japanese ghost story. If you buy into the fairy tale aspects from the start, it is an enchanting story. Another view, however, would be that the Hayakawa character is mad, and all of the other characters in the film gleefully take advantage of his madness, which is a little disturbing. In any case, there's not a whole lot of story, and what there is is delightful.

Without giving too much away, Hayakawa plays a painter who lives alone in the mountains, and is discovered and removed from his preferred environment and into the culture and civilization of Tokyo. His performance is astonishing; as the wild man of the mountains, he clearly prefigures the most antic roles of Toshiro Mifune, as he prances and leaps around the screen. But the longer he is in Tokyo, the more civilized his character becomes, and his performance reflects this as he calms down, eventually becoming as passive (or "tame") as the other characters.

The print is in rugged shape, as you might expect from a 1919 film that was recovered from a single French print thought lost for decades, but it is by no means unwatchable, and seems nearly complete. The title cards, of which there are entirely too many (really disrupting the flow), are new, as of course the ones in the surviving print are in French. (Interestingly, the film ends with "FIN", which I doubt was in the original American prints.) The newly-commissioned score is interesting, but throws in far too many cartoonish sound effects, such as a penny whistle when a pillow is tossed across a room. When I watch this again, I'll probably opt for silence.

The second feature, from 1914 and also lasting about an hour, is also quite interesting. It's in even worse shape, with many frames missing, but is substantially complete. It stars Hayakawa and Aoki (just before they were wed) as a father and daughter living under a Buddhist curse. They encounter a shipwrecked American sailor (the wreck itself a manifestation of the curse) who eventually converts them to Christianity, setting up a clash of religions that is played out both among humans and gods. This time, the stand-in for Japan is the gorgeous California coast. The score for this film is wonderful, effectively setting the mood without overwhelming the images.

Not being nearly as well-versed in silent film (or any other kind of film, for that matter) as nearly everyone else here, I'd happily recommend this release.

[Scharphedin2]

Thank you for the nice write-up Fiddlesticks. I have unfortunately not been able to view the films in their entirety yet, but from what I have seen so far, I do think it is an excellent release. I have posted some captures here.

[drdoros]

John Sinnott & Jeffrey Kauffman DVD Talk reviews of Dragon Painter

[carax09]

Thanks Fiddlesticks. I feel like I got a much better idea for what to expect, from your thoughtful account, than I did from the Fulvue review. I'm sorry you saw my request as an assignment, the most I was hoping for was a "It's great! You should buy it!" Thanks for going the extra mile. And thank you Dennis for keeping us all updated on what's happening with Milestone...

[fiddlesticks]

I only called it an "assignment" as a flip way of expressing my discomfort about anyone being interested in my opinion on anything other than small college basketball. So I appreciate the kind words.

Jeffrey Kauffman says in his review

The plot of The Dragon Painter [...] is a suitably eastern meditation on the source of inspiration and the relationship between Art and Love (yes, with capitals).

This is true. And John Sinnott, in his review, points out

The plot revolves around a crazy hermit, Tatsu (Hayakawa) who is convinced that his true love has been captured by a dragon. He lives in the mountains, painting dragons day after day waiting for hos [sic] princess to return.

At one point, one of Tatsu's new mentors looks at his work, holding up a lovely sketch of a waterfall and mountain pool between towering cliffs. The mentor remarks on how beautiful the painting is, but aware of the dragons-only stricture, asks Tatsu where the dragon is. "The dragon is asleep beneath the waters of the pool," he replies (or words to that effect.) How's that for a "suitably eastern meditation?"

This film/DVD truly is a delight. It's great! You should buy it!

[colinr0380]

DVD Beaver review

[drdoros]

Here's a link to a good article from Mobile, Alabama -- I got them interested because the author of The Dragon Painter novel was born and raised there and the journalist came up with some great info from the newspaper's archives that even I didn't know about.

DVD release garners new audience for Japanese actor, Mobile author

By MIKE BRANTLEY
TV & Media Editor

Tuesday's DVD release of a restored edition of the 1919 silent film "The Dragon Painter" is worth noting to Mobile area cinephiles not just because it's a respected entertainment not seen nearly enough by modern audiences.

It's worth trumpeting in these parts, too, because the film's story has a local connection.

The movie, which stars the incomparable Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, was written by a native Mobilian.

Born in Mobile on March 8, 1865, Mary McNeil Fenollosa went on to marry three times, travel the world and become a widely circulated author. "The Dragon Painter" garnered the writer a $10,000 prize from Collier's magazine before it was made into the well-received movie starring Hayakawa -- who would still be an international star 40 years later in "The Bridge Over the River Kwai."

Widowed at 20, the future Mrs. Fenollosa married her second husband, a teacher named Ledyard Scott, who took her to Japan. There, she learned to speak and write Japanese and studied Oriental art and culture.

Widowed again when Scott was killed by a lightning bolt off Point Clear, she eventually married Ernest Fenollosa, curator of the Oriental collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. The couple moved to Japan after their wedding in 1890, working together on his history of Oriental art and entertaining at their suburban Tokyo home.

Among Mary Fenollosa novels are 1906's "Truth Dexter" and "The Breath of the Gods." The former was written while she lived in Japan, and the latter was penned after she returned to Alabama. "The Breath of the Gods" was produced as an opera and a Broadway play.

"In 1907 she wrote 'Dragon Painter,' her second novel," said Dennis Doroso of Milestone Film & Video, which is distributing Tuesday's DVD release. "It was about Japan, and it was a big hit. It was on the cover of Collier's magazine and everything else. She was a pretty amazing woman. For any woman to move to Japan in the 1890s, especially during the height of racial hatred especially for Asians, was a pretty amazing thing."

After Ernest Fenollosa died in 1908, Mary Fenollosa finished "The Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art," a work he considered a crowning achievement.

Mary Fenollosa died Jan. 11, 1954, in Montrose. Her diaries are in the collection of the Museum of the City of Mobile.

The Fenollosas are being immortalized through the ongoing construction of the Ernest and Mary Fenollosa Japanese Garden in west Mobile. Situated on the site of a former fish hatchery fed by a freshwater spring, the garden at Forrest Hill Drive near Langan Park will be a worthy attraction when completed, according to Charles Wood, president of the Japanese Garden Foundation Inc.

No completion date for the project has been announced.

Wood said the garden is associated with the names of Ernest and Mary Fenollosa because of their connection to Mobile and because they received the highest award ever presented to any foreigner by the Emperor of Japan for their contribution to Japanese art history.

"The Dragon Painter" DVD, with a $29.95 list price, features a film described by its current distributor as "beautifully acted, gorgeously shot (with Yosemite Valley filling in for the Japanese landscape), and lovingly directed" by William Worthington.

Hayakawa plays Tatsu, an artist living as a hermit in the wilds of Japan. Thought mad by the local villagers, he believes that his princess fiancée has been captured by a dragon. His obsession leads to artistic inspiration.

Considered a lost film for a time, "The Dragon Painter" was rediscovered in a French distribution print that was brought to the George Eastman House in the United States for restoration. The effort made the new DVD possible.

The single-disc DVD release includes the main feature and a bonus feature film -- Thomas Ince's "The Wrath of the Gods" (1914), also starring Hayakawa.

The original novel by Fenollosa is also included in a format that can be viewed and printed on a computer equipped with a DVD-ROM drive. The DVD also features a copy of the script for "The Wrath of the Gods" and four stills galleries, among other materials.

[drdoros]

From The New York Times:

By DAVE KEHR

THE DRAGON PAINTER

When Sessue Hayakawa died in 1973, the headline writers remembered him as the scowling Japanese prison camp commander in David Lean’s 1957 film, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” But Hayakawa had earned his true place in film history some 40 years before when he became, against all the odds and prejudices of early-20th-century America, the first Asian actor to achieve genuine stardom in Hollywood.

The fascinating story of Hayakawa’s career, and the complicated cultural forces that gave rise to it, is told in Daisuke Miyao’s superb critical study “Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom,” published by Duke University Press. As a sadistic Japanese art dealer who sexually enslaves a Long Island society woman, Hayakawa had set hearts aflame with a sense of danger and exoticism in “The Cheat,” Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 melodrama. Hayakawa’s subsequent films, for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, were so successful that he was able to establish his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, in 1918. Even as the popular press was brimming with “yellow peril” scare stories, Hayakawa and his directing partner, William Worthington, produced 23 features in four years, one of which, “The Dragon Painter” (1919), has now been released on DVD by Milestone Film and Video.

Hayakawa’s brooding appeal comes through vividly in this Orientalist fantasy, based on a novel by Mary McNeil Fenollosa about an untutored provincial painter of such bounding genius that he is forcibly recruited as the artistic heir of a celebrated Tokyo artist (Edward Peil Sr.). He immediately falls in love with his patron’s daughter (Tsuru Aoki, Hayakawa’s wife), which leads to an unfortunate consequence: He is so happy in his union that he no longer feels the need to create. Drastic measures must, and will, be taken.

Barefoot and dressed in ragged black robes, Hayakawa here suggests nothing so much as the surliness and raw energy of Toshiro Mifune, as Akira Kurosawa would reveal it some 30 years later. Yet Hayakawa was valued at the time for the sense of restraint he brought to film acting. His perceived inexpressiveness particularly impressed the critics in France, where the perceptive Louis Delluc wrote about him in almost Bressonian terms:

“Few things in the cinema reveal to us, as the lights and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings. I well believe that all lonely people, and they are numerous, will discover their own resourceless despair in the intimate melancholy of this savage Hayakawa.”

The “Dragon Painter” disc includes, as a hefty bonus, the 1914 feature “The Wrath of the Gods,” directed by Reginald Barker for the producer Thomas H. Ince. Released a year before “The Cheat,” it finds Hayakawa in old-age makeup, playing a supporting role. The star here is Aoki, a Japanese-American actress whom Ince was promoting as a leading lady in a series of Japanese melodramas he seemed to regard as parallels to the popular American Indian romances he was turning out at the same time.

Playing opposite Aoki is a boyish, curly-haired actor named Frank Borzage, who would go on to direct some of the great Hollywood romances (including “Seventh Heaven” and “The Mortal Storm”). Here Borzage is an American sailor shipwrecked near Aoki’s village. His love affair with the local woman provokes the divine reaction of the title, in the form of a volcanic eruption intended by Ince to rival the spectacle of “The Last Days of Pompeii,” an Italian import that was one of the year’s big successes.

“Wrath” is the richer of the two films, both aesthetically (Barker’s direction has a dynamism lacking in Worthington’s studious, pictorial style) and culturally. The prospect of interracial romance is first presented as thrillingly forbidden, as it would be in “The Cheat,” but eventually earns cosmic approval in a climax that pits Jesus against Buddha in the grudge match of the millennium.

Hayakawa’s stardom would not survive the early ’20s — perhaps partly because Rudolph Valentino came along to snatch away his mantle of exotic eroticism, unburdened by racial politics — but while it lasted, it burned with surprising intensity. (Milestone, $29.95, not rated.)

[Mike Gebert]

Hey, a whole thread on this silent title (even if Dennis had to post a lot of it himself)! It's a very interesting release. Here's something I posted on NitrateVille, a discussion site for silent and early talkie film; most reviewers (Kehr above excepted) have semi-ignored the other feature on the set, so I put some emphasis on it.



You may be aware that there is a disc out, from Milestone, of a film starring the young and handsome Sessue Hayakawa, The Dragon Painter. To my mind, stressing The Dragon Painter is a smart way of selling the disc-- the Criterionesque cover promises "Genius. Madman. Lover" as if we're going to get a Ken Russell version of the life of Hiroshige-- but from a film history perspective, I think it somewhat misstates exactly what we have here in this two-feature Sessue Hayakawa set.

Tucked away on the bonus portion is a second feature, The Wrath of the Gods from 1914, also starring Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki as well as Frank Borzage, under the direction of Thomas Ince's top house director, Reginald Barker (Civilization, The Italian, The Bargain, The Coward, etc.) And though The Dragon Painter is unquestionably the better and certainly the more accessible movie, The Wrath of the Gods was the more significant one in its times, as Kevin Brownlow says in Behind the Mask of Innocence. But then, it wasn't exactly a starring vehicle for Hayakawa...

The Japanese film in the United States received its greatest boost when Thomas H. Ince signed a Japanese stage actress called Tsuru Aoki in 1913—together with her company of twenty Japanese players. Tsuru Aoki had come to America as a child in 1903 with her aunt, Sado Yacco, a celebrated dramatic dancer, and her uncle, the owner of the Imperial Theatre of Japan... In Los Angeles, she organized a Japanese theater and was succeeding so well she began to direct plays herself. Fred Mace, the comedian tempted her into pictures... want[ing] her for a series of split-reel comedies at Majestic...

Tsuru Aoki was born in Tokyo, but this was too mundane for the Ince publicity department; they declared her to be a native of the island of Sakura, which had recently been devastated by the eruption of the volcano Sakurajima. "Miss Aoki, having lost practically all her relatives in this eruption, was inconsolable and Mr. Ince thought he was due to lose her, that she would have to go back home. But in consoling her, he induced her to work in conjunction with him on a thrilling and powerful heart interest story, entitled Wrath of the Gods..."

In the meantime Aoki had encountered another young Japanese in Los Angeles running his own theater company staging Ibsen and Shakespeare. She persuaded Ince to see Sessue Hayakawa's production of a play called The Typhoon, and Hayakawa was engaged to play-- not the love interest, but Aoki's father under a bushy stage beard. And so they set out to turn the tragedy which Aoki had supposedly suffered under terribly into the sort of pseudo-Japanese melodrama western audiences expected. Coming at a moment when the Japanese were objects of both fear and curiosity in America (humble gardeners who had recently whipped imperial Russia at war), it was a hit:

Ince caught the public at precisely the right moment. So great was the demand that Marcus Loew opened up the Brooklyn National League baseball ground (Ebbets Field), seating 20,000; 40,000 people tried to get in, and a riot broke out when 15,000 were turned away...

"I never saw an audience more plainly moved than the thousands that sat in the Strand watching the kaleidoscope of elemental rage," reported W. Stephen Bush, who felt the appeal was doubly effective because the main roles were played by Japanese "with an earnestness and power which are rarely witnessed in the average screen performer."

That's cute, that parenthesis around Ebbets Field (perhaps you've heard of it). Anyway, though the intention was to make Aoki the first Asian Hollywood star, the real first Asian star was, if not born under all that makeup, at least conceived. The Typhoon, which offered Hayakawa a full-blooded melodramatic role (as a violent diplomat who lets an underling take the fall for his murder of his white mistress, eventually committing suicide), followed, cementing his position as the most magnetic figure in the group, and then he was lured away from Ince by Jesse Lasky for the silent role which would make him a big enough star to have his own production company into the early 1920s-- The Cheat. Aoki proved savvier than Ince about the screen appeal of this dynamic young actor with the movie-friendly chiseled features-- she married him, and went with him through his star career and for the rest of her life.

There's a wonderful moment in the film Topsy-Turvy, about the creative process that led to The Mikado, in which W.S. Gilbert invites a Japanese theatrical company to his theater to show his actors how to be more Japanese. But the cultural gulf between them, what they think theater is for and about, is too great, and the Japanese end up doing nothing more than acting out and confirming all of Gilbert's preconceived notions about what Japanese are like.

The Wrath of the Gods is something like that. The cast is full of real Asians (which is more than you can say for The Dragon Painter) but American curiosity about the Japanese is satisfied with a farrago of stock notions. Aoki wishes to marry a white sailor who has washed up on her local beach (Borzage, looking like Flat Top in Dick Tracy), but her father warns her that a vengeful Lord Buddha (!) has put a curse on her family so that if any daughter of their family marries, Mt. Sakurajima will blow its top. The couple elope, and Sakurajima explodes (I trust that point will not come as a spoiler) in a spectacular Irwin Allen finish which allows the couple to escape Buddha's wrath for white civilization (where, it is presumed, Buddha does not have jurisdiction). As stories of devoted daughters leaving their aging fathers to find love go, not exactly Tokyo Story.

From the Barker films I've seen (all of those listed above) Barker tended to be a particularly skilled director for the mid-teens, well attuned to giving his actors camera attention rather than merely blocking out their movements for a camera parked across the stage. But Wrath of the Gods is inconsistent in that regard. An opening typhoon sequence on the sailor's ship would be well-staged by 1940s standards, and the disaster sequence at the end is reasonably exciting (if the effects are a bit quaint, a convincing model of the harbor with dimestore sparklers going off in its volcano).

But the staging of the dialogue scenes is very theatrical, shot as flat against backdrops as a police lineup; even when they act in front of the boulders of a California beach, the effect is of watching footage of a theatrical troupe performing in the outdoors, rather than of getting caught up in the plot. At a brisk 60 minutes and with plenty of plot and visual interest, Wrath of the Gods is no chore to watch today, not at all, but it doesn't compare to more impressive and accomplished Barker films like The Coward or least of all that other foray into a strange immigrant culture, The Italian.


A later Aoki title seeks to rekindle memories of an old hit.

When Fannie Ward [in The Cheat] realizes she had made a blunder and tries to win Tori back, he meets her advances with a flash of cold scorn. [Harry Carr wrote] "It sounds like an exaggeration; but it is an actual fact that, with that glance, Hayakawa not only made himself famous, but actually started a new school of acting-- the school of repression."

Hayakawa explained that he had been brought up to follow the Samurai traditions: "I was always taught that it was disgraceful to show emotion. Consequently, in that scene as in all other scenes, I purposely tried to show nothing by my face. But in my heart I thought, 'God how I hate you.' And of course it got over to the audience with far greater force than any facial expression could."

Well, that may be Hayakawa feeding us westerners a bit of what we expect to hear, too, but there's no question that a huge part of the force of The Cheat comes from his understanding that revenge is a dish best acted cold. In an age of flailing arms, including his own in Wrath of the Gods, Hayakawa's minimalist fury was electrifying (not least because it hinted that something volcanically resentful might be stirring underneath every placid Asian mask).

The Dragon Painter was Hayakawa's attempt to get away from that kind of stereotyping of Japanese-- from roles, Brownlow says, in which he inevitably ended up committing seppuku to allow the white lovers their happiness. It is his art film, and was not particularly popular then, but needless to say it wears far better than a stock-characters piece like Wrath of the Gods did, and in fact watching it, it is not hard to imagine it as a minor Mizoguchi from the 1930s. Mizoguchi would have made more out of the female lead's sadness and sacrifice (he always did), and one could say that The Dragon Painter looks like a fine Japanese drama but doesn't have appreciably more psychological insight than Wrath of the Gods does-- but in terms of the delicacy of the telling, the unforced pictorial beauty, the sympathy, and the gently tragic sense of life's disappointments, the comparison with that Japanese master in particular is not overstated. (So who was director William Worthington, and did he ever make anything else so good?)

Hayakawa plays a young painter who's somewhere between being a bohemian and being tetched. He cavorts in the wild, ripping up pictures which don't satisfy him, and scaring the local villagers. Meanwhile an aging master (played by a white actor who looks startlingly like Chuck Jones) who just happens to have a daughter lacks an heir to carry on his house's long artistic traditions. Hayakawa is recruited (and seemingly tamed with a single haircut), and he finds in young daughter Aoki (who, if truth be told, is looking a little matronly by this time-- where Hayakawa seems to have lost five years since The Cheat) the dragon princess he'd always painted. But as Dostoevsky could have told you, how can a contented man create great art?

Hayakawa's acting here is not so samurai-oblique, in fact the arms do wave a bit in the early sections, though he smolders more later. But the performance is vigorous and physical enough, with enough of a threat of danger contained within it, to call up another comparison with another Japanese master, Kurosawa, whose early films-- with titles like Drunken Angel and They Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail-- served as such a showcase for the electrfying young Toshiro Mifune, whose animalistic physicality and sly, insolent intelligence had the impact on proper Japanese culture of Brando and Elvis combined. No, Hayakawa isn't that far out in 1919, but it's easy to see why, next to so many white guys standing around in drawing rooms with pencil thin mustaches, especially next to so many inscrutable Asians moving on little cat feet in Hollywood movies, Hayakawa transcended race, at least for a few years, to rank as a star through an imposing sense of his own physicality on screen.


Silent star playing cards, from 1916.

[HerrSchreck]

Hey, a whole thread on this silent title (even if Dennis had to post a lot of it himself)!

Dude this is getting funny-- you don't explore the site beyond a cursory look, then begin each post with a sigh that you're the only one engaging in the kind of activity that you're looking for... meanwhile you're essentially publicizing your favorite site.

There is a ton of discussion regarding silent film here:

General Milestone

Silent Film on DVD
Oskar Fischinger
Flicker Alley

Aside from the general Kino thread with dozens of pages, theres the annotated Kino catalog thread,
Image Entertainment
Vintage Film Buff
Murnau Box
Epoch's Chinese Silents

That'll get you started, but it's about ten percent of the silent material available to you if you learn to navigate it. I've devoted threads to Carl Mayer, Jean Epstein, there are wonderful threads for Stroeheim, Murnau, Lang, Abel Gance (two threads, maybe three), French Impressionism, Raymond Bernard, Feyder, Gremillon, Duvivier, it goes on and on.

LURK MOAR.