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A newspaper headline sums up the drama, "Shooting in the Smart Set." In a pool of Caravaggio lighting sits the Burmese magnate (Sessue Hayakawa), engrossed in his shrine figurines—a condensed Asian stillness, contrasted with the scattered flea-hopping of the Long Island socialite (Fannie Ward) who catches his fancy. The heroine is a dippy fritterer, the latest bourgeois-vamp fashions are a must while the stockbroker husband (Jack Dean) works overtime, it all comes to an impasse at the Red Cross fundraising gala. Ten grand lost in an investment, ten grand covered by the dapper intruder, the price is the promise of an indiscretion. "East is east..." Cecil B. DeMille may quote Kipling's dictum of racial separatism, but he also understands the cinematic zones where the dueling impulses of prudery and titillation meet. The idea of a bare pale shoulder on the receiving end of a lusty foreigner's branding iron is both gloating threat and lascivious fantasy: Hayakawa shows Ward his smoldering stamp ("That means it belongs to me"), the deed is staged with a dainty figure squirming below the frame as steam rises into view (cf. Sansho the Bailiff). Another coup: She shoots the ravisher, he leaves a bloody stain as he slumps against a rice-paper wall, the husband curtails the silhouette theater with a fist through the screen. Overstuffed boudoirs and prison bars on blank backgrounds figure in the rounded image of contrasts, Hayakawa's sensuality complicates the Yellow Peril boogeyman with sinuous elegance. The crowd at the trial is visibly a movie audience, leaning in for prurient details and whipped into a frenzy of Victorian bloodlust after the climactic reveal. DeMille restores (remarries, really) the conventional couple to profuse applause, the complications are worked out by Capra (The Bitter Tea of General Yen). Cinematography by Alvin Wyckoff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |