The Dragon Painter (Haworth Pictures Corporation, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that TCM showed two silent films from 1919 featuring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, born Kintarō Hayakawa in Nanaura (now Chikura), Chiba Prefecture, Japan on June 10, 1886. Hayakawa’s family wanted him to become an officer in the Japanese Navy, but he ruptured his eardrum in a diving accident at 18 and failed the Navy physical. Hayakawa was so convinced he’d dishonored his father that he attempted suicide. His dad rescued him in time but Hayakawa decided to leave Japan and emigrate to the U.S. He went to the University of Chicago, where he studied economics and played on the football team, where he was once penalized for using a jiu-jitsu move on an opposing player. At least that’s the story he told in his autobiography, though other researchers have disputed it. Hayakawa got into acting in 1914 when he joined a stage company producing a play called The Typhoon. There he met actress Tsuru Aoki, whom he later married. Aoki got the legendary Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince to see the play, and Ince liked it so much he bought the movie rights and filmed it with the identical cast. Hayakawa’s darkly handsome looks, his wiry athletic physique, and his relatively restrained acting style (what he called muga, meaning “the absence of doing”) made him an instant sensation. Ince produced two more films with him, The Wrath of the Gods (with his wife Aoki) and The Sacrifice. Then Hayakawa jumped ship to Paramount and for his second film there made The Cheat for director Cecil B. DeMille (reviewed on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/05/cheat-paramount-19151918.html).

This was a wild, sexually driven melodrama in which stage actress Fannie Ward played the wife of a wealthy stockbroker who embezzles $10,000 from her husband that was intended for a charity. Needing to replace the money immediately, she finds that the only person who will help her is a well-to-do Asian (Sessue Hayakawa) – he was Japanese in the 1915 version but was changed to a Burmese in the 1918 reissue after Japanese-American groups complained about the racism – who insists that he’ll give her the money only if she’ll have sex with him. When she goes for their fateful meeting, he literally brands her on the shoulder to claim her as his personal property – and she kills him, is put on trial but acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Hayakawa understandably got upset that, while he was a major star, all he got offered was roles as a dastardly sexual villain. In 1919, in an extraordinarily racially aware remark for the era, he told an interviewer, “Such roles are not true to our Japanese nature. ... They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are." Accordingly he teamed up with director William Worthington and investor William Joseph Connery, whom Hayakawa meant when they were both students at the University of Chicago, to form Haworth Pictures, taking the company’s name from the first syllables of Hayakawa’s and Worthington’s last name and designing a logo strikingly reminiscent of the Rising Sun Japanese flag. They cut a distribution deal with Robertson-Cole and made 23 films over the next four years, until business disputes with Robertson-Cole led to the dissolution of the company and Hayakawa’s departure from Hollywood. He went to France and made a film there (ironically also for Robertson-Cole), returning to America in 1926 for Broadway and vaudeville appearances, and not making another U.S. film until Daughter of the Dragon (1931) – ironically as yet another stereotypical Asian villain.

TCM showed two surviving examples of Haworth’s output, The Dragon Painter and The Tong Man, both from 1919, both directed by Worthington, written by Richard Schayer and photographed by Frank D. Williams. The Dragon Painter, based on a novel by Mary McNeil Fenollosa, turned out to be a gem, a quite beautiful and haunting movie about an aging painter, Kano Indara (Edward Pell), who’s worried that the long generation of painters named Indara is going to die with him because he hasn’t had a son and he hasn’t found an apprentice good enough to train. A friend named Uchida (Toyo Fujita) finds a series of drawings in the mountains; they’ve been made by a “wild,” untrained artist named Tatsu (Sessue Hayakawa). Tatsu is convinced that a thousand years previously a stunningly attractive young woman was turned into a dragon by a wicked sorcerer, but he believes that if he keeps drawing mountain scenes, sooner or later the dragon woman will appear, change into a normal human female and be his partner and companion. Uchida and two of his friends decide to go into the mountains, bring Tatsu back, introduce him to Indara and make him the apprentice that will continue the Indara painting tradition. They do this by convincing Tatsu that Indara’s daughter, Ume-Ko (Tsuru Aoki), is the legendary dragon woman of Tatsu’s dreams. Ume-Ko had earlier auditioned to be her father’s apprentice herself, but he predictably dismissed her work as “good – for a woman – but I need a son.” Tatsu and Ume-Ko duly get married, but marital happiness proves fatal to his talent as an artist; he does only mediocre work from then on. Then Ume-Ko dies, and Tatsu’s grief at losing her leads him to a series of utterly brilliant paintings that are exhibited in a one-man show and become a huge success. The unhappy Tatsu starts seeing visions of Ume-Ko, or her ghost, or something, and eventually it turns out that Ume-Ko is alive after all – she and her dad faked her death so Tatsu could regain his painter’s mojo – and they have a long, happy and artistically successful life together.

What struck me most about The Dragon Painter is the overall visual look: Frank D. Williams’s cinematography really made the movie look like Japanese art, and though there were a few modest color tints they didn’t distract or call attention to themselves the way they sometimes do. There have been two major restoration jobs on The Dragon Painter, in 1988 and 2005, and given what they had to work with, the film as it stands holds up quite well. There were two surviving copies of the movie, one from The Netherlands in the original American cut, and one from France of an alternate European version. The restorers, including the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and a Dutch company called EYE, worked from both those sources to produce as complete a version as possible. When scenes appeared in both versions, they went with the Dutch one because it was of better picture quality. This left the problem of intertitles, since the two extant prints had them in Dutch or French. They came up with new English titles drawn from the ones in the Dutch and French versions, and also by reference to Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s source novel. They used surviving English-language versions of other Haworth films as references to make sure the titles matched the era typographically (a consideration that’s often been ignored in silent restorations). And they hired Mark Izu to do a new musical score for the film; that’s often a source of dread for me, but Izu’s score, evocative not only of traditional Japanese music but 1960’s jazz as well (Izu’s band was a four-piece jazz ensemble including a soprano saxophone played very much in the style of John Coltrane, especially in his forays into “Eastern” music), was evocative and very much suited the mood of the film. The Dragon Painter was a quite beautiful mood piece and, despite the predictable melodramatic nature of the plot, definitely fulfilled Hayakawa’s desire for a role in a story that “shall reveal us as we really are.”