Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s

Chapter 4 Sessue Hayakawa: The Mirror, the Racialized Body, and Photogénie

91 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 4 Sessue Hayakawa The Mirror, the Racialized Body, and Photogénie DAISUKE MIYAO Many popular audiences of cinema remember Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) for his Oscar-nominated role as a frowning Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Yet Hayakawa was a movie star in the United States as early as 1915, and the only Asian matinee idol of the silent era (see Miyao). His astounding performance as a sexy villain in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) propelled him to superstardom during a time when the general public supported segregation and when mixed marriages were illegal in many states. Sessue Hayakawa, circa 1918. From the author’s collection. In The Cheat, Hayakawa played the role of Hishuru Tori, a rich Japanese art dealer on Long Island, and famous stage actress Fannie Ward portrayed heroine Edith Hardy, a young married Caucasian woman. In a key scene, Edith faints upon hearing that her stock investment has failed. Under the moonlight, in front of a shoji screen shining white in the dark corridor of a Japanese-style house, Tori slowly leans toward her limp body, whose skin is strikingly alabaster, and steals a kiss. When Edith awakens, Tori offers her money in exchange for her body. She accepts. But when she tries to return his money after her husband’s success in the stock market, Tori assaults her and brutally brands her naked shoulder with a hot iron bearing his trademark stamp. Edith fights back and shoots Tori in the shoulder. Ultimately, Edith’s husband pleads guilty to the shooting in order to save her name and he is arrested on a charge of attempted murder. During the trial, Edith confesses the truth, reveals the brand on her shoulder, and an enraged courtroom audience attacks Tori. The Cheat reveals an intriguing contradiction at the root of Hayakawa’s stardom. On one hand, the violent reaction of the courtroom at the end of the film expresses white Americans’ intolerance of the racial Other, and stresses the impossibility of fully assimilating the Japanese in American society. On the other hand, the affective charge of the scene in which Tori brands the white woman violently appealed to viewers and propelled Hayakawa to international fame. The powerful effect of the branding scene emanates from Hayakawa’s face, revealed in a series of close-shots as Tori tears Edith’s clothes, grabs her hair, and brutally throws her forward onto the desk. As he lowers the branding iron closer and closer to Edith’s bare shoulder, pausing as the iron almost reaches her white flesh, the lighting from the brazier casts ominous shadows on his taut face, intensifying the tension of the scene. The branding itself is completed offscreen, but the smoke shimmers in front of Tori as he grimaces with a tightly closed mouth. The intensity registered by Hayakawa’s face, its veritable assault on the viewer, was likened in its effect to that of a gun by French film critic Jean Epstein: “Hayakawa aims his incandescent mask like a revolver. Wrapped in darkness, ranged in the cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid” (Epstein, “Magnification” 239–40). The sensational appeal of Hayakawa’s performance in The Cheat ignited his immediate ascent to stardom, launching a critical and popular acclaim that would grow throughout the remainder of the decade. Importantly, however , the recurrent motif in most of Hayakawa’s star vehicles, the unbridge92 DAISUKE MIYAO able gap between two cultures or races, is often explained in a famous—and infamous—Orientalist line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” from British author Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 verse, “The Ballad of East and West.” The line appears repeatedly as intertitles in Hayakawa ’s star vehicles, including The Cheat, and in reviews. Each to His Kind (1917), a Hayakawa star vehicle produced at Lasky, for instance, was described by the New York Dramatic Mirror as “a screen version of Kipling’s assertion that ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’” (“Each to His Kind,” 10 February 1917, 26). Although Hayakawa’s fame enabled him to establish his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, in March...