Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom

by Daisuke Miyao

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes. Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star’s initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, History

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2007

Reviews

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, so my main impression was that Daisuke Miyao's book on Sessue Hayakawa was not completely finished. It felt like there was a layer of analysis missing, kind of like a layer cake without any filling in between the layers, but everything else is there. The information Miyao presents is very good, and he draws from a great many sources, which is nice. He has a clear and concise method of presenting the themes and ideas at work in Hayakawa's career and position in film history. But the book really read like the draft right before the final one, and sometimes stylistically it became very tiresome. The mixture of analysis and narrative is strangely balanced, and so not completely successful. Maybe more narrative thrust would have helped?

Also, I was surprised at how little mention Anna May Wong got. Surely for the purposes of comparison and contrast, she would be a valuable character to add to the book (with the occasional exception of Tsuru Aoki, women are not present in this book very much as individuals, which was another problem). Although maybe Miyao did not have access to the information on Wong? I don't know what the timeline was like.

I recommend it to people interested in the topic(s), and it is an interesting and informative read which starts off quite well. It tapers away a little, but it's still worth the time.

[Creolecat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Emilie · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed the analysis of Hayakawa's star image, I felt the writing itself was rough, definitely in need of further editing. It's definitely more on the dry, academic side, but if you don't mind that and you love the silent era, you will probably want to read this.

It does make me really want a Hayakawa biography though. I wanted to know more about this man's life after his stardom days.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although we judge history through a lens of modern day values, there's no denying that America and the world were racist places back during the 1910s. This was a time of D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION, which had a racist view of African-Americans, and Japanese people were not allowed to become naturalized citizens due to their ancestry. This makes it remarkable that Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa burst on the Hollywood scene in 1915 with THE CHEAT. While never a huge star, he was definitely an important one for a few years at Paramount. He then set up his own production company and produced quite a few starring films for himself.

Hayakawa had to walk a fine line in his films. There were miscegenation laws in most states, which said that different races could not intermarry. He usually couldn't even touch his female co-stars, much less kiss them or end up with them at the end of the movie. He tried to keep from being typecast by portraying Chinese, (Asian) Indian, Burmese, Egyptian and other ethnic characters.

Unfortunately, after World War I, California became very anti-Japanese and the box office returns of his films plummeted. He traveled to Europe for a few years, and appeared in films there. In the 1930s, he lived back in Japan. However, in the run-up to World War II Japan became very nationalistic and Hayakawa didn't fit in there either. He was finally able to have a final taste of career success with his great role in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and several other big Hollywood films in the 1950s.

Miyao has definitely done his research. Besides reconstructing the storylines of many lost films from the 1910s, he has mined Japanese film magazines for reviews of Hayakawa's films. The book is quite interesting as it gets into American's fascination with Japanese culture (or at least stereotypical Japanese culture) and Japanese audience's perception that Hayakawa was too "American". The book's venture into describing Hayakawa's acting technique is confusing though.

This is a good but not great book. I can recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in silent film history, as well as anyone interested in American history and how one Japanese actor was able to make it as a movie star for a few years during the silent era.