When it comes to presenting non-Western cultures, early Hollywood was quite the mixed bag—lots of yellowface and Orientalism, but now and then a film that not only cast Asians in Asian roles but tried to incorporate some understanding of non-Western cultures into the story and production. The Dragon Painter (1919), produced by Sessue Hayakawa’s production company Haworth Pictures Corp. and directed by the prolific actor and director William Worthington, gets several big things right even if it’s also very much a product of its time.
That it gets anything right is a credit to Hayakawa, who first made his name as an actor in silent films like The Wrath of the Gods (1914) and The Cheat (1915). While such films gave him leading roles that capitalized on his matinee-idol good looks and intense performance style, they also drew on a host of unfortunate attitudes and stereotypes that saw anything and anyone from East Asia as exotic and forbidden. After the Japanese community in California expressed their dissatisfaction with Hayakawa’s wily villain in The Cheat, he founded Haworth Pictures with the intent of producing films that would better represent Japanese culture.
The plot of The Dragon Painter comes from a story by Mary McNeil Fenollosa, adapted by Richard Schayer, and shows the kind of compromises Hayakaws had to make in order to make a film that would succeed with Western audiences yet also present a somewhat authentic view of Japanese culture. The hero is a gifted painter (Tatsu, played by Hayakawa) and something of a wild man who believes that his fiancée was kidnapped by the gods and turned into a dragon. That belief motivates his art, as he paints dragons obsessively and is never satisfied with the results.
Meanwhile noted painter Kano Indara* (Edward Peil, Sr.) is getting on in years and is afraid he’ll die without an artistic heir. While he begrudgingly acknowledges that his daughter Ume-Ko’s (Tsuru Aoki, Hayakawa’s real-life wife) paintings are “pretty good for a woman,” what he really wants is a male apprentice to carry on his legacy. Uchido (Toyo Fujita), a government surveyor, acts as matchmaker: after seeing some of Tatsu’s work, he convinces him to come to Tokyo and meet Indara, tricking Tatsu by saying Indara can help Tatsu regain his fiancée. A lot happens after that, and the plot works itself out through a series of melodramatic conventions (which it shared with many popular movies of the day) plus a few surprises.
The most compelling reasons to watch The Dragon Painter are Sessue’s impassioned performance and the film’s visual style. Some of the scenes are clearly arranged to recall the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and Indara’s studio includes many objects and stylistic elements associated with traditional Japanese life, including tatami mats, sliding doors, and a garden with a torii and stone lanterns. However, the need to fulfill Western expectations means that some aspects of Japanese life are not portrayed authentically: for instance, Ume-ko wears a shimada hairstyle and a kimono both before and after her marriage, which would not have been the case in a traditional Japanese household.
The Dragon Painter is a fine example of the art of compromise. Hayakawa incorporated a fair amount of Japanese culture into this film, avoided the most exploitative of contemporary stereotypes, and cast three of the four central roles with Japanese actors. There’s probably a story behind the casting of Peil, Sr. (a Hollywood veteran who appeared in more than 370 films) as Indara, but if so, I don’t what it was. On the other hand, the influence of Japonisme (a Western craze for Japanese art and design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) is present both in the original story (Mary McNeil Fenollosa was married to Ernest Fenollosa, who helped popularize the trend in the United States) and in some of the visual details, such as Ume-ko’s hairstyle and dress as mentioned above. It’s certainly different enough from most Hollywood films of the day to be worth a look, and it’s also interesting to see what the actor who played camp commandment Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwaiwas doing early in his career. | Sarah Boslaugh
*The name “Kano Indara” alludes to the Kano school of Japanese painting.
The Dragon Painter is distributed on Blu-ray and DVD by Kino Lorber. The print is made from a 4K digital restoration and includes additional footage not included in the 1988 restoration. Extras include two soundtracks, by Mas Koga and Makia Matsumura; the documentary Reconstructing the Dragon Painter (66 min.); two films starring Sessue Hayakawa, His Birthright (47 min.) and The Man Beneath (66 min.); and an illustrated booklet.
