History of Film Episode 034

American Invasion, Sessue Hayakawa, and The Cheat

Draft Podcast Script written by Jacob Aschieris. 

    

When you are reading about the great war period of French film history it's really common to see military metaphors used to describe the impact of American film on the French cinemas. I mean, it's just so easy. I, myself, did not resist the impulse to do so last episode. I invoked the language of invasions and battlefronts, French cinema was caught flat footed, their defenses were weakened by having to send their filmmakers to the front lines. While I was writing this Episode I was actually thumbing through Sun Tzu to see if I could extend the metaphor even further. I found some, by the way: 

“You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended… “You may advance and be absolutely irresistible, if you make for the enemy’s weak points… “We can form a single united body, while the enemy must split up into fractions. Hence there will be a whole pitted against separate parts of a whole, which means that we shall be many to the enemy’s few” (Sunzi).

From what I can tell, pretty much all of chapter 6 of The Art of War will work to analogize WW1 and the influx of American motion pictures into France in 1915 — if you are willing to be a little cheeky about it. 

But why all this war talk? Can I not come up with any original metaphors? Where is, I don't know, comparisons to start trek or invasive species, or whatever? For one, I don't have the strength of will to avoid such low hanging extended metaphors. But another reason is because, if you read between the lines, this is how some French people thought about it at the time. Richard Able points out that the Publisher of the contemporary magazine Le Film described France after the war as being “in danger of becoming a cinematographic colony of the United States” (116). Colonies are prizes of war, conquered and occupied territories kept for the Economic interest victor — something Frenchmen well understood at the time. 

Any nascent French national filmmaking style was also dominated by American filmmaking norms. As no less a source than Leon Gaumont himself said of his film productions “American technique and French subtitles, that is what must be done now (Able, French Cinema, 13). Is it not fair, or even obvious, to compare this kind of forced technical and artistic assimilation to the outcome of a conquest? Gone is the native garb, comes the American business suit. 

As this series of episodes about movies during the First World War rolls on, and even more as we cover French film in the 1920s, it becomes clear that French production, and French art film in particular, was never fully choked out by American cinema. But economically, it was in 1915 that French cinemas became a colonial holding of Hollywood. Today's episode is the story of that war. This is the 34th episode of the History of Film: American Invasion.

Last episode, we ended in the spring of 1915, and with one of my all time favorite quotes about movies I have ever read. It came from Philippe Soupault and read, in part, “We [the people of Paris] rushed into the cinemas, and realized immediately that everything had changed. On the screen appeared the smile of Pearl White—that almost ferocious smile which announced the revolution, the beginning of a new world” (Able, French Cinema, 10). Man, that guy knew how to write. 

Now you may be thinking, as I was, after hearing that: Okay, great, so American movies took over empty French projection screens in the spring of 1915, and it changed everything, got it. But why? Why then and not any sooner? Why not any later? What caused the change? Well, as far as I can tell, we don't know — at least not for sure. Even experts, who have written whole books about the history of American-franco film trade, admit that our records from the period just aren't good enough to paint a full picture of just how the “American film invasion” actually went down (Ulff-Møller 25). So we will have to work with two minds here: like scientists, we must be content to know how something happened; then like philosophers, we must make our best guess at why.

Let us begin our journey with an innocuous statement from our main man Richard Able: “It all began during the spring of 1915 when [Louis] Aubert released the first Mack Sennett Keystone comedies” (French Cinema, 10). Boy did it begin.

First of all, who is Louis Aubert? Honestly, you don't need to worry about that. Aubert will be around for another couple of decades in the story of French film production, but always on the sidelines, so if you want, keep him in mind for however many episodes we will be spending in France. All you really need to know is that he got his start in the world of film exhibition not as a motion picture producer, but as a film importer.

I made a lot of hay in episode 32 about the strength of the French film industry before the war, and all that hay was justified, but you can often tell a story two ways. Pathé and the French producers were titans, but titans always need to look out for upstart gods seeking to take their place. Even before the war, some foreign companies, including Vitagraph, had distribution offices in France (Able, French Cinema, 9). Italian Epics were as popular in France as the United States, and the profitability of importing foreign films, along with decreasing access to capital from French banks, was already challenging French motion picture hegemony on its own soil (9). Before the war, Aubert was one of the people who was all too happy to make a killing off showing foreign movies in his home market. He got a very lucky strike when he distributed Quo Vadis? To French audiences 1913. He was, perhaps, less lucky when that success compelled him to start building his own exhibition theaters — the year before the war (9). 

The point is, the idea of showing imported movies in French theaters was nothing new. Aubert had already made a bundle doing it, so it is no wonder that he started doing it again. The question is: why did it happen when it happened? I have two possible answers for that, both are a little bit tricky and involve some guesswork.

The first relies on some background about the trade situation created by the war. The United States, as an industrial power an ocean away from the bombs and blasts, made a killing by selling France and the other allied powers, basically, whatever they asked for. U.S. Exports almost tripled during the war (Michon). There was also a broad “we Americans won't sell to the Central Powers” policy in the U.S., so at some point, the U.S. Government stepped in to make sure that American film, just as much as American wheat and American automobiles were only being watched by the right sort (Ulff-Møller 25). Knowing that, I think it's possible that some people in France, or some people in America, or both, thought it would be a good idea to follow the prevailing trade winds and in U.S. motion pictures as a war good. I mean, it was being done for everything else, why not? It just took a little over a year to get the system in shape after the war ground everything to a halt. So that is my first guess: Economics. It just took a little time for film trade systems and supply lines to catch up with necessary war goods.

My second guess is cultural rather than material. There are times, after a national calamity or in a period of widespread need, that it can just feel wrong to go about life as usual. I’ve seen it happen in my own life several times. Maybe French exhibitors like Aubert felt that the people of France weren't ready to watch “the fun movies” again, or that they would think whoever had the audacity to show playful motion pictures was a crass opportunist, unwilling to sacrifice to serve the national interest. If this was the case, exhibitors may have just been reading the room and decided about a year into the war that people might be ready and willing to indulge in a little escapism. 

It could be either of these, or neither of these, or a combination of both of these reasons. It's just my best thinking, and we may never know for sure. But whatever the reason, the time was right for an explosion of American films on screen. And what movies they were.

In 1915, when Louis Aubert began showing imported American films, he showed motion pictures made by people whose names still reverberate across film history. You may still recognize some of them 110 years later. They were the stars of Mack Sennet’s Keystone studio’s famous comedy films: The great comedienne Mable Normand, the beloved Roscoe, nicknamed “Fatty” Arbuckle, and a diminutive tramp named Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin would gain his famous French nickname “Charlot” within months (Able, French Cinema 10). And we will not be talking about any of them today. All three of these silent comedy masters deserve whole episodes plural because all three of them were involved in various events that would change the course of film history forever. We will cover them when we spend an inordinate time talking about American film, whenever we get there.

Considering the talent on display, It comes as no surprise to us now that the people of France took to these new American movies in a big way. They were a bit of relief and fun against the backdrop of the up-till-then greatest tragedy in European history. We have already seen some of it back in episode 18. Just after Aubert imported the Keystone comedies, Pathé started showing the Mysteries of New York serials starring Pearl White and her almost ferocious smile of the revolution. Her serials were such a big hit that it became fashionable for the women of Paris to emulate her on screen outfit. White gloves, narrow brimmed hats, skirts, and black vests were soon seen on screen, and off, all around Paris (Able, French Cinema, 10). 

These movies entered the French film market thanks to a new economic practice by American film studios: dumping. Dumping films has two components, quantity and cost. American filmmakers had been producing motion pictures for all of 1914 when the good citizens of the Third Republic weren't watching them. This created an amazing backlog of American films that could be “dumped” into the French market all at once (Ulff-Møller xv, 25). Flooding the cinemas with American film meant that there was plenty to go around. Just look at the Comedies of Keystone Studios we already mentioned. In 1914, Charles “Charlot” Chaplin made 36 films for Keystone Studios. Arbuckle Made 54, with an additional backlog of 37 from 1913. Mable Normand only made 24 films for Keystone in 1914 but had been active in American film for years by this point, starting work for Vitagraph in 1911. And those are just the big three stars. Keystone also produced their famous series about bumbling police officers “The Keystone Cops” and movies starring other, lesser-known actors, at a frightening pace. This one studio was able to dump all of these movies into the French market at the same time. And French distributors were happy to buy them because they were so cheap.

The movies being “dumped” into France were being sold at discount bin prices because, to American studios, they were discount bin movies. These were films that had already been shown in the United States, and crucially, had already recouped their cost (Ulff-Møller xv, 25). Studios could afford to sell their films to the French for cheap because there was no economic risk in doing so. By selling them for cheap, production companies could ensure that everything would sell. French exhibitors were happy to get “new” American film for low, low prices, and American studios were happy to line their pockets with small amounts of pure profit per film, but in very large quantities. 

I want to take us back to the war analogy that we started with, let's re-ask the question. How did American film conquer French screens in the mid 1910s? Last week we saw one major factor: they were “undefended.” Essentially no French film was being made to compete with cinema coming from across the Atlantic. And just now we saw another factor, the sheer number of American films was overwhelming. I am reminded of two quotes from two famously brutal conquerors. Napoleon Bonaparte once told his opposition “You cannot stop me, I spend 30,000 lives a month” And the vicious dictator Joseph Stalin is supposed to have once said that “quantity has a quality all its own.” When fighting any war, it doesn't hurt to outnumber your opponent. In those terms, the French film industry didn't stand a chance. But, there is also something to be said for quality itself. It is not for no reason that the filmmakers of France, when they resumed their noble work, would do so while taking inspiration from the American style. To get an idea of the quality of American film at the time, we are going to look at one specific movie; Cecil B. Demille’s 1915 film The Cheat.

The Cheat is an interesting film for a lot of reasons, both historical and textual. It is also one of the first films we have seen in a while that we might consider “canonical.” The Cheat, joins the ranks of some of the most important and influential movies we have discussed so far, ranking alongside The Train Arrives at the Station, A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery, Caberia, The Birth of a Nation, and, Intolerance. It is widely considered a classic, especially in Europe, as far as I understand, and regularly makes the screening list for American film history classes at a university level. 

And, like a certain, much more famous American film from 1915, it is also a deeply racist movie about the dangers that non-white men pose to white American women. I would argue, though, that The Cheat handles its blatant racism in a much more complex and interesting way than The Birth of a Nation does while being a full two hours shorter. Part of that complexity comes from the Dangerous man of the story being Japanese, and not black — a truly enormous difference in the social mindset of turn of the century America — and part of it comes from one of the first truly amazing film performances we have seen on this show, courtesy of the amazing Sessu Hayakawa. Also, part comes from the undeniable fact that Cecil B. DeMille is a better director than David Wark Griffith. I am going to describe the film in fairly vivid detail, so this description will take a few minutes, though Far less than The Cheat’s actual 1 hour runtime. The 1918 reedit of The Cheat is freely available on YouTube, and is worth your time to watch. All that background established, on with the show. 

Our story begins with three inter-titles and three establishing shots introducing our three main characters. The first is for a man named Hishuru Tori, Played by Sessu Hayakawa. After being told his name we see him sitting in his room, darkened by night. A single light source illuminates his body and face against a background of complete blackness. He is wearing Japanese-style robes, and stokes a small fire in an urn on his desk, heating a branding iron. As the fire blazes, his sharp and handsome features are lit by an incredible light. He brands an ivory statue that he is holding, causing it to burn and smoke. There is a cut. We see a close up of his branding mark, an image of a traditional Japanese torii gate. He works with an intensity and grace that are compelling to watch on their own terms. The entire scene is lit like a Renaissance painting. As Tori moves his face and body become half obscured by black, starkly contrasting shadows. Once his work is done, he puts a lid on his fire and turns out his light. The scene ends with a diegetic plunge into complete darkness. 

The next two introductory shots are far less interesting. We meet Richard Hardy, played by Jack Dean, who we are informed via title card is a New York Stock Broker. Hardy is busy looking over a ticker tape and looking distressed. He is also lit against a black background but isn't really doing anything interesting. Finally, we meet the heroine of the story, Edith, Richard Hardy’s Wife, played by Fannie Ward. She is recognizably in a room, broadly lit, and dressed in the height of fashion, garbed in a low cut evening gown and in a cap stacked a foot high in lace and feathers. 

As the story proper begins, we learn that Edith, one of New York’s upper class, loves to indulge in the conspicuous opulence that defined well to do ladies of her time and place. Through a phone call, and a really lovely piece of parallel and continuity editing, we learn that Richard has invested the entire family fortune into a particular stock, and asks Edith to “economize her spending” until his investment comes through and they become absurdly wealthy. Edith, annoyed at her nag of a husband trying to stop her spending, which, to be fair, would endanger her social status and relationships with the other women of the smart set, refuses. As the phone call ends, the man who Edith takes much more pleasure in being with than her husband, Hishuru Tori, arrives. After a little flirtation, and some cutaways to the frustrated Richard, Edith and Tori leave home together for a social event of some prominence.

We then see that Tori is Edith’s escort to a Red Cross fundraising event. The well to do of New York are raising money for the Red Cross in support of the people of Belgium, who, remember, have only recently been invaded by the Kaiser's army. Even in this escapist fantasy, the great war is lurking in the background. Tori and Edith continue to play and flirt. At the end of the scene, Edith is given $10,000, which she as the social club’s treasurer, is charged with safeguarding until it is to be given to the Belgians. That astonishing sum, worth over $300,000 today when adjusted for inflation, is placed in Edith’s personal safe.

Edith and Tori return to her home. Richard, back from the office, looks on, agitated as the two toy with each other, Edith falling into Tori’s arms. As they part, Tori’s eyes follow Edith out of frame, watching her with evident hunger. Back in the house, yet again begs his wife to control her spending. Edith, once again refuses. Fade to black. 

The next scene opens on a wide shot of Edith and Richard, hosting a social event in their home. Edith sequesters herself away with Tori and describes her tale of woe to him. He offers to help her with however much money she needs, with the telling line “No one need know.” Edith is taken aback by the implications of this line and what it would imply for their relationship but plays it mildly. Richard interrupts them. Then there is a cool moment where Richard lights Tori’s cigarette. That part isn't plot important, but man does it punch. Away from her husband yet again, Edith meets another man who makes an attractive boast: he has an “in” on a stock so profitable that whatever money he invests in it tonight will double by the morning. Sensing an easy way out of her financial trouble, Edith impulsively steals the $10,000 and hands it over to the speculator. Fade to black.

The next scene finds our three main characters at yet another party, this time a Red Cross benefit at the home of the man of the hour, Hishuru Tori. As always, Edith and Tori beg off the presence of Richard to be alone together. This time they walk together into Tori’s bedroom, They discuss the desk we, the audience, saw at the beginning of the film. Tori explains the function of his branding Iron to Edith. Looking at Edith with remarkable intensity, he leans in and explains what his burn mark signifies, “that means it belongs to me.” They spend a little more time in the room looking at Tori's collection of Japanese artifacts, including an incense burner, samurai armor, a blossoming cherry tree, and a statue of the Buddha. For most of the film, Tori has been dressed in American business clothes, driving American cars, and spending time with the white upper class in New York. In what seems like a crass and obvious metaphor in 2024, we can now see that inside, Tori is very much Japanese. The couple is interrupted by the scot speculator we met in the last scene. As Tori stares at them from across the room, the speculator informs Edith that his investments have failed: The $10,000 has evaporated into thin air — then he leaves. Overcome with shock, fear, guilt, and embarrassment, Edith Collapses. Overcome by desire, Tori kisses unconscious lips. There is a change in lighting, once more, of a brief moment, the not quite couple is plunged in Theo the stark, shadowy world we began the film with. 

In another room, Tori revives Edith, now desperate for money to cover her crime. In a very well done series of shots, the shadow of Richard being cast against a Japanese paper wall divider is intercut with actual footage of Richard. He is explaining to a friend that he has no money and couldn't get any more at the moment under any circumstances. Armed with this piece of news, Tori is able to convince Edith that she has no choice. He will write her a check for $10,000 and she will consummate that long flirtation, and have sex with him. Weeping, she agrees. At the end of the party, Edith goes home on the arm of her husband. 

The next day, the understandably preoccupied Edith is met with welcome news. Richard’s investments have gone through. Amid their celebrations, we once more see some strong parallel editing, as we watch Tori phone Edith. Tori orders her to come to his home that very night. The still jubilant and ignorant Richard must now be in possession of truly unimaginable wealth, because when Edith quickly asks for 10,000, claiming she lost it playing bridge, Richard happily and indulgently writes a check.

The next scene is the part of the film that everyone remembers — Its technical prowess is on full display. In the evening, Edith, armed with her $10,000 check, goes to meet Tori. Richard, suspicious of his wife’s furtive, follows her in secret. Edith appears outside Tori’s shadow room, silhouetted against the light shining through his paper door. Upon entering, Edith offers Tori a $10,000 check as repayment for her debt. He refuses, demanding the promised sexual favor. Edith threatens to kill herself. Tori calls her bluff, handing her a pistol which she limply drops onto the floor. As Tori orders the doors to be locked and pulls a struggling Edith toward him, she grabs a nearby staff and begins to beat Tori with it. It is no use. Tori, in his anger, pulls Edith to his desk by her hair. He holds her down, rips down her sleeve, and brands the flesh of her back with his mark. Edith falls to the ground. Seeing the pistol she dropped earlier, Edith fires at Tori, wounding his shoulder, and then flees. Richard hears the gunshot and bursts through the paper wall. When he sees the $10,000 check he wrote discarded on the ground, he comprehends the whole story. The police arrive, and Richard turns himself in for the attempted murder of Hishuru Tori.

The rest of the film wraps up relatively quickly. Edith visits Richard in jail and begs him to tell the truth about who shot Tori, but he refuses. She visits Tori and begs him to drop the charges. Tori replies that he cannot, and even if it were possible, he wouldn't. Insisting he “will not be cheated twice.” Later in a dramatic courtroom scene, Tori is asked by a lawyer “Who shot you?” Tori, with his unique intensity, points to Richard. Richard freely admits his guilt. The jury of 12 white men hand down their verdict: guilty. 

Edith can no longer remain silent. She rushes to the front of the courtroom. She reveals that she, not her husband, short Tori, and offers her branded flesh as her defense. Enraged by the by the evident sexual misconduct perpetrated against a white woman by a Japanese man, the crowded courtroom rises up and attempts to Lynch Immediately. Court officials step in to protect him, and Tori is pulled away from the angry mob. The judge dismisses the indictment against Richard, and the husband and wife embrace as they exit the courtroom in each other’s arms. The end.

 

Okay. Now that we know what happened in this movie, it's time to really start talking about it — but where do we start, exactly? We spent three mammoth episodes talking about The Birth of a Nation because we needed to, and honestly, I feel like this movie bears discussion just as much, and is, uhh, you know, better. But we won’t be doing that here. I've been trying to figure it out for a while… and I think the best way to talk about The Cheat in the context of film history is to break down our analysis into four parts. These parts are 1. It's sexual 2. It's racist 3. It is technically groundbreaking and finally 4. It was a whale of a picture in France. Let's begin at the beginning. 

Having just watched the film again, I would venture a guess that what stands out the most to most people who watch The Cheat is its potent combination of fairly up-front sexuality and its racist depiction of its Japanese lead, Sessu Hayakawa. Even though I separated these two aspects of the film into an enumerated list, they really go together. Case in point: You can currently buy a copy of The Cheat on DVD from a few distributors, but A boutique DVD label called Kino Lorber has a description of the film on their website that I think sums up the most basic appeal of The Cheat remarkably well. 

Although Fannie Ward was ostensibly the star of The Cheat, it was Hayakawa… who emerged as the true attraction. As Valentino would years later, the exotic Japanese actor tapped into a vein of post-Victorian female masochism, eroticism and fashionable Orientalism of the day, fulfilling many women's taboo desires to be seduced and possessed by a man of another race. (“The Cheat”).

To put it bluntly, a lot of people, including — but not exclusively — a lot of women, liked the film because of how sexy it was. Hayakawa’s presence and performance in The Cheat are overwhelming. He displays sexual intensity not only when his character is violently pulling Fannie Ward’s hair, holding her down, and stripping her, but in his lingering gazes, flirtations, and even when he is merely sitting quietly and smoking a cigarette. Fanny Ward would have a moderate career in motion pictures after The Cheat. Who has ever even heard of Jack Dean? Hayakawa, on the other hand, would become one of the biggest stars of the silent era. But all that “exotic” sex appeal comes at a price. In The Cheat and for much of his acting career, Hayakawa’s appeal came from embodying what was forbidden white women of a high moral standing.

Now for those of you who watched the film and are now thinking “I don't feel that the sexual assault in The Cheat, or any other context, is sexy at all” you are both moral and right. But as I once heard a great historian say: The past is an alien world. In the United States at the time there was constant uproar about the vile content of motion pictures spoiling the minds of the people who went to see them. There were also something called “anti-miscegenation” laws, that made it illegal for white people, especially white women, to have any kind of physical relationship with those of other races. The U.S. was also in the midst of what was called at the time “the yellow peril,” a period of widespread fear from white Americans about the increasing number of Asians coming into the United States. The movie wants to have its cake and eat it too. It Indulges in the fantasy of a filtration and sexual relationship with the literally forbidden lover, but then tacitly reassures the audience that “race-mixing” is forbidden for a reason and that the increasing Japanese population in the United States really was a menace.

So here we see one of the most important and lasting impacts of The Cheat. It helped establish a formula that would define the future of American motion pictures for the next five decades. Movies could allow paying audiences to indulge in their most sinful and taboo fantasies, so long as, in the end, lip service was paid to maintaining the established social order. Cecil B. DeMille made a whole career out of it, still one of the longest and most successful in the history of film. I once read an introductory film textbook that had a few lines about this, and they have always stayed with me. This is from A Short History of Film by Wheeler Winston Dixon And Gwendolyn Audrey Foster:

Each [film Cecil B. DeMille made] offered spectacles of sin and destruction, but with a difference: the last reel of each DeMille film showed miscreants being firmly punished. So long as such behavior was not condoned, DeMille was able to get away with a great deal of sex and violence on the screen… Thus was established the typical DeMille formula; sin, sex, and titillation—but in the end, adherence to an absolute moral code (41-42).

Dixon and Foster say this about DeMille specifically, but he should be thought of as a pioneer, rather than an exclusive practitioner. The Cheat solidified developing trends in American cinema: you could keep the moralists and purity culturalists appeased by adding plausible deniability in the last reel. Though Hayakawa’s character in The Cheat is undeniably a sexual predator, history shows us that audiences, even and especially female audiences, got a different message from his work in The Cheat. Sessue Hayakawa would be one of the biggest stars of the era and one of the first great sex symbols of American and World cinema. 

I say all this to explain how the film works and what its impact on film history was, not to excuse its blatant racism. The film is undeniably and profoundly racist, though in a different way than we saw in movies like The Birth of a Nation. In The Cheat, Sessue Hayakawa is depicted on film through a particular kind of racist lens called “Orientalism.” 

The term “orientalism” as it is most often used today was developed by the brilliant scholar Edward Said. It is multifaceted and can be a little hard to explain. First and foremost, like all racisms, it is predicated that one “race” is better than another -- the term being applied about as broadly as it can be. Orientalism differs from other racist fallacies in a few ways though. First It groups all people south Russia and east of, I don't know let's say… Bulgaria, as one “kind of person,” as an “oriental” from the “Orient” — or an easterner from the east. No matter the ethnic group or cultural tradition, all these people have a fundamental sameness about them. Whether they be from Egypt, Palestine, Mongolia, India, China, or Japan, all of them are, at their heart, “oriental,” and share the same basic characteristics. On top of this, Orientalism presumes that while Europe is progressing somehow, “the East” is locked in time — eternally stuck in between cavemen like barbarity and “true civilization.” To borrow the language of the King James Bible, orientalist racism holds that “the East” has “a form of [civilization] but denies the power thereof.” It maintains that orientals at heart are wicked savages from the rank and file of Genghis Khan.

But here is the kicker. Orientalist racism also holds that the people it deems to be “orientals” are also somehow closer to a forgotten classical past. Thus, though the people of the East may be barbarians, they have an untainted cultural purity to their art and being that was desirable to European intellectuals and worldly collectors. It's paradoxical, but that's orientalism. This is why, in the United States at the turn of the century, you could have laws forbidding Japanese people from entering the county, and high class exhibitions of brilliant Japanese art simultaneously (Miyao 10-13). 

So, that is Jake's retelling of Said’s description of orientalist racism. And you can see this mindset’s fingerprints all over The Cheat. It's Hayakawa’s character, Tori, living in a palatal garden filled with beautiful art that turns out to be a haram den of sin slavery. It's Tori putting on a show assimilating into U.S. culture but never being able to change his barbarous nature. It is also Tori’s barely bridled sexuality. There is little room for argument here, that is just what is in the movie. Listen to what one German film critic, Claire Goll, said of Hayakawa just a few years later in the 1920’s:

Wholly spiritual is the great Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa. He knows no trivial little feelings, but only primal sensation. One finds no trace here of an art sullied by civilization. When he portrays sorrow, his pain is of ancient dimensions. When he plays the lover, his smile has the grace and aroma of lotus and cherry blossoms. As the avenger, his body explodes in exotic wilderness. Whoever sees him knows everything about Japan, everything of the beauty of the mystical East (Miyao 3).

What possible better description of Orientalism could there be than this quote?

We are talking about this here for the same reason we talked about racism so much in the Birth of a Nation episodes. Orientalism will not go away. We will see it for the rest of film history until this very day. It will not be harmless. The Cheat’s negative impact on world culture may be much smaller than Griffith’s film. And yes, Hayakawa became a super-star beloved the world over. But it was a dehumanizing kind of stardom in a world where he and others were not allowed to live fully within it. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II are still yet to come. Hayakawa’s stardom is not apart from this, it was wrapped up in it. And more immediately, at least one Japanese man was lynched in California by a gang of white men who were so roused by the events of The Cheat that they decided to attack the supposed “yellow menace” themselves (Miyao 27). Most things, even most movies, are not only one thing. This movie was a source of great pleasure for millions, a star-making vehicle for an extremely talented actor, and helped fan the flames of racism. It did all of this, and with amazing technical sophistication. 

The Cheat is a very well made 1915 motion picture and was produced by talented filmmakers. It was cutting edge, and you can feel it. As I mentioned a few times while describing the film, Its editing shows just how sophisticated and modern movies were starting to become. All of the hallmarks of continuity editing we have come to expect are present in the film. Shots are intercut in such a way that the audience is not only able to understand what is physically happening but also what the characters are thinking. This is especially evident during the scenes involving phone calls. During the first phone call scene, one character calls another and the film pivots between showing the audience both of them and the intertitles explaining the conversation. It's so clear and conventional now it is almost invisible. What is much more interesting though is when these cuts are not motivated by a phone call but are used to show us what a character is thinking. 

When Fanny Ward’s character, Edith, learns that she and her husband are rich, the film suddenly shifts away from the action to show us Hayakawa’s character across town, in a completely different space. We cut from her concerned face to Hayakawa, then back. It is a brilliant move that prefigures what would come to be known as the “Kuleshov Effect” in editing when it was further and consciously developed by Soviet filmmakers years later. To quote the biographer Scott Eyman: “For 1915, this is innovative; given the sexual implications of the cutting, it’s truly remarkable” (112). Even in space, though, the film does really well. The many large party scenes begin with establishing shots, before moving into a blend of medium shots and dramatic closeups, none of which are disorienting. In one scene, in which the action takes place on two different sides of a wall, we cut seamlessly between the sides, our minds creating a single space out of two different locations. The Cheat displays about as much technical fluency in its editing as any 1915 film ever did, and much, much more than most. In terms of technical direction and editing The Cheat is a triumph. All that said, editing is not the technical aspect of this film that people remember it for. That would be its lighting.

All of the best scenes in The Cheat have very unusual lighting for 1915. My father, an artist, would call the kind of lighting we see in the film Caravaggio light. DeMille called it Rembrandt lighting. In the world of film studies and film analysis, we have another, specialist, term for it: Chiaroscuro. Literally meaning light and dark. This is the style of lighting that would bring all the darkness and drama to film noir a few decades from now, and give the German filmmakers the means to express the vivid horrors of their imaginations after the war. It isn't fully formed yet, but you can see a preview of coming attractions all the way back in 1915.

When describing the plot of The Cheat I also described the look of the chiaroscuro lighting, but I didn't define it. The dictionary built into my computer says it is “an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something (Apple Dictionary, accessed 12 November 2024 ). That's good as far as it goes, but when we use the term in film to mean light coming from a particular direction that also creates very high contrast. In a black and white film, this has the effect of eliminating much of the gray space in between the brightest and darkest parts of the image and purposefully obscures parts of the background and even parts of the actors' faces. This is an extremely stylized look and adds to the drama of scenes it is used in. It often works metaphorically, as it does in The Cheat, allowing the audience to make connections between the physical and moral darkness of a space. It is very difficult to pull off, and what we see in The Cheat is an important early example. 

In his autobiography, Cecil B. DeMille recalls that it was a challenge to implement chiaroscuro into his films, which was still a new and untested technique. As he was first working with others to develop the style for an earlier film, The Warrens of Virginia, his producer at the time 

wired back to ask what we were doing. Didn't we know that if we showed only half an actor's face, the exhibitors would want to pay only half the usual price for the picture?… I wired back… that if the exhibitors did not know Rembrandt lighting when they saw it, so much the worse for them. Sam's reply was jubilant with relief: for Rembrandt lighting the exhibitors would pay double! (115)

Apparently, by linking his film exterminations to a classical master, he was able to legitimize his work in the eyes of the always conservative studio financiers. We saw Griffith doing the same thing with Charles Dickens at about the same time, back in episode 23. 

The lighting remains its greatest, lasting innovation. Scott Eyman quotes the great film archivist, James Card as saying “The lighting is advanced, creative and sophisticated beyond any other film of 1915.. . . The dramatic utilization of Japanese decor (shadows and blood on the shattering wall screens) did not reappear in the United States until Kurosawa” (112). I couldn't have said it better. 

As we have seen, The Cheat is famous for being an admixture of many innovative elements. It was sexually provocative, racist in a very timely and popular way, competently edited, and visually stunning. While not the best selling film of all time (like The Birth of a Nation might still be) it still hit audiences like a truck. In the United States, its box office receipts would bring in almost $100,000 against a budget of about $17,000, so its investors were feeling pretty good about it (Eyman 113). But remember, what we are concerned about here is France. It was a hit across America. It was unprecedented in Europe. 

The overseas take for The Cheat was an additional $40,000 (Eyman 113). I’m guessing that number is so comparatively low because of the “dumping” practice we talked about earlier in this episode, though I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that rocked France to its core. Critics raved about it. It played in Paris cinemas for a full 6 months (Able, Oxford, 115), and would usher in the full a whole new era of legitimization for film in France. After seeing The Cheat one Paris theater critic who used to hate movies had a full conversion — he became a film critic instead (Eyman 113-14). The Cheatwas later adapted into both a stage play and an opera. If that isn't legitimate, what is? 

If movies were weapons, The Cheat was the most destructive technology yet introduced into the war for French cinema. The crater it left behind obliterated French filmmaking as it existed before the war. There are a number of great descriptions of the transformation in French cinema caused by The Cheat (and American films more generally) across many of the sources, but one of my favorites comes yet again from Scott Eyman. It goes like this:

The Cheat synthesized all the strengths of the American movies, and of DeMille. Not analysis, but action; not tracking, but cutting: drama that is primarily theatrical conveyed through means that are purely cinematic—the best of both worlds (114).

That was all a little flowery, but we can put it more succinctly. Someone already has. Recalling the war period, one French filmmaker simply put it: “The Cheat… and then a hundred other films provided the evidence for French [filmmakers]. We could no longer explain away such success as isolated incidents. We were surely in the presence of superior methods” (Able, French Cinema, 11). 

The Combined force of DeMille, and Chaplin, and Arbuckle, and Pearl White, and a hundred others crushed the enemy. Surrender was the only option. America had succeeded in its invasion of French cinema, hell, of European cinema. American studios would be loath to lose territory for the rest of the silent era and beyond. But wherever there is a conqueror, there will be resistance. French filmmakers would soon return to their cameras and rebel against American film hegemony in comparatively small, but significant and very interesting ways. Where the Americans sent in Pearl White and her serialized adventures, the French counterattacked with vicious Vampires. Where Americans sent melodramas like The Cheat, French filmmakers responded with their own “films for women.” Next episode we will learn all about the counter insurgencies of home-grown French films. And when French cinema fights back, it will do so with American technique. 

 

Thank you for listening to this episode of the history of film. This was a robust episode, and I had to bring it to a close if I ever wanted to get it released. But there is so much I had to leave out. I was initially planning on talking about how The Cheat is defended from a popular genre film of America at the time, the “white slave” picture, but we didn't cover that at all. I also didn't describe the magnitude of Hayakawa’s French stardom (maybe we can get to that later). But there is something that I didn't include, that I must, so I will do so here. If you watch The Cheat on YouTube or that kino-lorber DVD, you will find that the character Hayakawa plays is not the Japanese socialite Hishuru Tori, but a Burmese “Ivory King” named Haka Akaru. The film was re-edited in 1918 to change the race of Hayakawa's character. Apparently, this happened either because protest from Japanese Americans was strong enough that the studio decided to change it, or because Japan and the U.S. were allies during WWI, and the country wanted to play nice, sources often list both as explanations for the change. Only the title cards were changed, the film is otherwise completely intact — another good example of the universalizing tendency in Orientalism. I decided to describe the film with the original name because that is the version that would have made the splash in France in our period of study.

If you would like to contact me, you can do so at historyoffilmpodcast@gmail.com. The show's website is historyoffilmpodcast.com, and I will post my working script to that page after I comb over it for errors to make it a little more readable. My principal sources for this episode were Richard Able’s French Cinema: The First Wave, Jens Ulff-Møller’s book Hollywood’s Film Wars with France, Scott Eymans Empire of Dreams, and Daisuke Miyao’s excellent Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. There are links in the episode description to the History of Films Discord Server and LetterBoxed, as well as a link to support the show. Thank you very much for listening and join me next time for another exciting episode of the History of Film.

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Work Cited:​

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Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. 

Abel, Richard. “French Silent Cinema.” Chapter. In The Oxford History of World Cinema, 112–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

“The Cheat.” Kino Lorber. Accessed November 11, 2024. https://kinolorber.com/film/thecheat. 

DeMille, Cecil B. The Autobiography of DeMille. Edited by Donals Hayne. Englewood Cliffs N.J: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959.

Dixon, Wheeler W., and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short History of Film. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Eyman, Scott. Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 

Michon, Heather. "The US Economy in World War I." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/world-war-i-economy-4157436 (accessed November 8, 2024).

Miyao, Daisuke.  Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

Sunzi. “The Art of War.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/132-h/132-h.htm. Accessed November 18, 2024. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/132/pg132-images.html.

Ulff-Møller, Jens. Hollywood’s Film Wars with France: Film-trade diplomacy and the emergence of the French Film Quota Policy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001.​