The Dragon Painter is a new Blu-ray from Milestone Films that showcases three silent features produced by its star, Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. For reasons complex and absurd, he was not only Hollywood’s first Asian male star but its first foreign heart-throb, known for his handsome, smoldering sexuality.
Hayakawa was no ordinary immigrant escaping poverty. He never became an American citizen, which may have had something to do with restrictive immigration laws, but it’s also true that he was comfortable in Japan, where he came from a well-to-do family. He claimed his father sent him to the University of Chicago, but this is uncertain. We know that in 1914, Hayakawa went into acting on the Los Angeles stage, where he quickly found success and married his early co-star, Tsuru Aoki.
Hayakawa’s starring role in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Cheat (1915) made him a certifiable sex symbol and vanguard of Hollywood’s trend in “exotic” lovers, a trend partly necessitated by the convention that WASP American stars were too morally upright and middle-class to have sex before marriage, and hardly after. Therefore, only foreigners could have it.
Their “foreignness” might be fabricated, like that of notorious “vamp” Theda Bara (born a good Jewish girl in Cincinnati), or they might be real immigrants like decadent aristocrat Erich von Stroheim (“the man you love to hate”) or “Latin lovers” like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, or sophisticated glamour queens like Greta Garbo or Pola Negri. Whatever the case, an alleged foreign status was the ticket to on-screen sex life in Hollywood pictures, and such actors fulfilled many a feverish fantasy for ticket-buyers.
Hayakawa was so popular that he founded his own production company, Haworth Pictures Corporation, whose name combines Hayakawa with primary director William Worthington. From 1918 to 1922, Haworth released a successful string of 23 films. By far, the most famous is The Dragon Painter (1919), which has been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Its rediscovery and first restoration in 1988 created something of a stir, as this evidence of an Asian production auteur necessitated some rewriting of film history.
Hayakawa plays Tatsu, a rambunctious, somewhat demented wild man of the mountains who lives under the mania that his lost love has been stolen by the gods and turned into a dragon. He claims that he only paints pictures of dragons. When someone asks where the dragon is in his painting of a mountain lake, he answers, “The dragon is sleeping at the bottom of the lake.” In other words, Tatsu is an archetype of the unruly visionary genius.
His mania is more or less benevolently manipulated, although this point is ambiguous, by a master painter who needs a son and successor. Kano Indara (Edward Peil) lives with his daughter Ume-ko (Tsuru Aoki, Mrs. Hayakawa). She laments that she wasn’t born a man. She falls in love or something with Tatsu and engages in nine kinds of duplicity to save his genius. Claiming to be his lost dragon is only the start of it.
When PopMatters first discussed this film in our overview of the 2023 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, we noted: “The fanciful plot comes from a 1906 novel by Mary McNeil Fenellosa, whose husband, Ernest Fenellosa, was a noted scholar of Japanese art. Although she published The Dragon Painter under her name, she wrote most of her novels as Sidney McCall. So what we have here is a Japanese star-producer appropriating a popular novel about Japan by an American woman as a vehicle for himself and his wife and melding the property to their sensibilities.”
As directed by Worthington, scripted by Richard Schayer, shot by Frank D. Williams, and designed by Milton Menasco, the picturesque romance is played by an almost entirely Asian cast amid lovely settings, including Yosemite National Park. As producer-star, Hayakawa seemingly had no objection to a non-Asian actor as Ume-ko’s father, and it’s revealing that Peil seems to play the role without any face-altering makeup. He looks like a Caucasian in a kimono, and apparently, we’re asked to accept him by his acting skills alone.
While Milestone previously released The Dragon Painter on DVD in 2008, this 2024 Blu-ray is a different edition based on a longer Dutch print at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum. The 2023 restoration brings the film to its most complete running time of one hour. Collectors should hold on to the 2008 edition for its different set of bonus films. Also, the 2008 DVD has a score by Mark Izu, while the 2024 Blu-ray offers scores by Makia Matsumura (piano) and Mas Koga (small ensemble).
A wonderful, instructive bonus on the Blu-ray is the side-by-side presentations of both existing prints. The recently discovered Dutch print is taken from the original US negative, while the previously available print from George Eastman House was a French print that used alternative takes for the export version. None of the footage is exactly the same. This presentation, with commentary, allows us to see which scenes are absent from which version and how the 2023 restoration combines the best bits of each.
Milestone’s new Blu-ray throws in two more Haworth features from Eye Filmmuseum’s collection, both directed by William Worthington. His Birthright (1918), with two reels missing, and The Man Beneath (1919) are melodramas that hinge on the subject of miscegenation. They’re in favor of it. As a matter of possibly relevant tea, the married Hayakawa had an affair with one of his white co-stars, Ruth Noble, who bore him a son out of wedlock. Hayakawa and Aoki adopted him and raised him in Japan.
His Birthright is among the many riffs on the cultural mythology of “Madame Butterfly”. In various forms and from various authors, such as John Luther Long’s short story from 1895 and the numerous plays and operas it inspired, its history is too complicated to describe here, but what matters is that American and European cultural perceptions of Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were shaped by this allegory of Japan as a geisha seduced and abandoned by a Western military officer. It struck a chord in Japan, too.
Made in the immediate aftermath of America’s victory in WWI, His Birthright opens with the son of a Japanese woman and an American naval officer being raised in Japan after the mother commits suicide. As co-written by Hayakawa, who plays him, the boy is called Yukio, the name he gave his real-life son! Topping it off, Aoki plays Yukio’s mother in flashbacks. Believing his mother was jilted, Yukio comes to America to kill his father. He unwittingly mixes with German spies, especially lovely Edna Kingston (Marin Sais), who hypnotizes him to steal plans from his admiral father (Howard Davies).
Yukio’s disposition towards America is shown by his enthusiastic response to an African-American jazz band, and a marching band will equally stir him. Then, amid literal flag-waving, Yukio claims America as his country, and it’s implied he’s about to volunteer for WWI. As a historical point, it’s largely forgotten that Japan’s militarist government was an ally against the Germans then. At any rate, the point of His Birthright is that a mixed-race Japanese man can be an American hero – at least during WWI.
Hayakawa’s sensitivity in adapting other sources for his purposes can be seen again in The Man Beneath, based on a 1901 novel by Edmund Mitchell that made its point against racial prejudice with an in-your-face offensive title, Only a Nigger. The cleaned-up ghost of that title occurs in the film’s first scene, which establishes the home of Kate Erskine (Helen Jerome Eddy) and her younger sister Mary (Pauline Curley), who’s engaged to James Bassett (future silent superstar John Gilbert, here billed as Jack Gilbert). They’re all friends with James’ mentor, the famous Indian scientist Ashutor (Hayakawa). They’re reading about his success in the newspapers, and Mary teases them by saying he’s “Only a Hindu.”
Kate responds that race and religion have nothing to do with science. Alas, when Ashutor proposes to her, she takes the pained position that they can’t defy social prejudice and their children would suffer. The rest of The Man Beneath will show Ashutor heroically helping James to escape the clutches of the Black Hand, an Italian criminal society he joined in his youthful folly. There were, in fact, several widely different groups called the Black Hand, and this confusion was convenient for silent melodrama and pulp fiction, which mixed and matched at will whenever some shadowy terror was needed.
The role of Ashutor exemplifies that Hayakawa freely cast himself as all kinds of nationalities as long as they fit his “exotic” heroism. As with Peil in The Dragon Painter, Hayakawa doesn’t apply any special makeup for the role; he puts on a turban and is now an Indian Hindu scientist. That’s either naïve or advanced, possibly both. He pretends, and we pretend, and it’s better than seeing him slathered in makeup.
The list of Hayakawa’s films for Haworth and others is tantalizing. Most of the silent material is lost, although sources are contradictory on the subject. It would be wonderful to see Marshall Neilan’s The Bottle Imp (1917), a lavish fantasy based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s story; Worthington’s The Illustrious Prince (1919) from a thriller by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and The Beggar Prince (1920), with a dual role for the star; and three directed in 1920 by Charles Swickard, An Arabian Knight, The Devil’s Claim with a dual role, and Li Ting Lang, about a Chinese prince turned revolutionary.
Hayakawa ran his own company during the same time that American actor and screenwriter Noble Johnson founded the first black-owned film studio, when Oscar Micheaux became a successful indie producer of “race films”, when the highest-paid film director was a woman, Lois Weber, and when the woods were full of indie filmmakers of every stripe. After decades of technical obsolescence and cultural amnesia, early cinema’s wild and woolly nature has only started to come to light in recent decades of scholarship. Hayakawa’s important silent film career is still being rescued from oblivion, and this Blu-ray of The Dragon Painter is a welcome step in that process.