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.
