Sessue Hayakawa and the Portrayal of East Asians in Hollywood Movies
March 16th, 2008 by Andre Soares
Stephen Whitty in the Newark Star-Ledger:
"Progress is never a straight line.
"Gains are made and lost, breakthroughs braked by backlashes. Lasting change is less a result of revolution than evolution — minds slowly won, hearts gradually softened.
"Which is why the enlightened past can sometimes feel like the far-off future.
"Today, Asian actors are coldly marginalized. Yet 90 years ago, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars was Japanese. He co-starred opposite white actresses. He even ran his own production company — a first for a minority performer.
"His career as an American leading man ended before the silents did. He recaptured his old celebrity only once, decades later, getting an Oscar nomination for playing the Colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai [top photo, with Alec Guinness].
"And yet Sessue Hayakawa still seems far ahead of us today."
***
Whitty’s article is definitely worth reading, though strangely there’s no mention of Hayakawa’s actress-wife, Tsuru Aoki, who also had a following in the 1910s. In fact, she played opposite her husband in about a couple of dozen films.
As for Hayakawa’s Hollywood demise in the early 1920s, that was hardly unique. One could always blame xenophobia and the "yellow peril," but most major stars in those days lasted about four or five years at the top.
Hayakawa had been around since the mid-1910s. By 1920 his vehicles had become repetitive — he appeared in about 60 films between 1914 and 1920 — and he went down just like the rest of them.
Cecil B. DeMille’s overwrought The Cheat (1915) is probably Hayakawa’s best known silent film, but of the (few) Hayakawa vehicles I’ve seen my favorite is the 1914 melodrama The Wrath of the Gods, in which he plays opposite Aoki and future Academy Award-winning director Frank Borzage. The prolific — and now utterly forgotten — Reginald Barker directed.
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