May 6, 13, 20, 27 |11 movies
Sessue Hayakawa is ready for his close-up as TCM’s May Star of the Month. Best known for his indelible Oscar nominated performance as the brutal Colonel Saito in David Lean’s Academy Award-winning 1957 epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Japanese actor had a five-decade career dating back to the silent era. He was one of the first Asian movie stars in Hollywood and one of cinema’s first sex symbols.
TCM will be screening a total of 11 Hayakawa movies Monday evenings throughout May beginning with his seminal 1915 film The Cheat and concluding Memorial Day with The Bridge on the River Kwai.
There are a lot of myths and legends surrounding the actor, who was born Kintaro Hayakawa in 1886. The actor maintained he attended the University of Chicago, but an article in the university’s magazine begs to differ. In fact, they only found him enrolled in two home correspondence classes. He also said that before he returned to Japan in 1913, he saw a play in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was so entranced that he cancelled his ticket to Japan and joined the theater troupe where he was discovered by producer Thomas Ince.
But according to Daisuke Miyao, author of “Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom,” he had a series of odd jobs including dishwasher and ice cream vendor before joining the Japanese theater. The1914 film The Typhoon launched his career and in 1915 he signed with Famous Players-Lasky, which became Paramount. He created a sensation that year in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat.
It was extraordinary that he became a star. His New York Times obituary mentions that some audiences had never seen a Japanese person before. Though he was making $7,500 a week by 1920, he had to deal with anti-Japanese sentiments and because of miscegenation laws, Hayakawa could only walk off into the sunset if his leading lady was also Asian.
Tired of being typecast, he co-created his own production company, Haworth Pictures in 1918. Over the next three years, he produced 23 films and by 1920 had earned $2 million.
TCM is concluding the first evening with two of Haworth’s 1919 productions - The Tong Man and the memorable The Dragon Painter. Based on a popular novel, The Dragon Painter finds Hayakawa as a young man who believes he was engaged to a princess metamorphosed into a dragon. He transforms his sadness and longing into stunningly beautiful paintings. He becomes the protégé of a famous artist when he’s told that his princess will be there. The painter’s daughter (Hayakawa’s wife Aoki) is presented to him as his long-lost love. However, because he is now content, he finds he can no longer create his paintings. It’s a lovely film driven by Hayakawa’s haunting performance and his chemistry with his wife.
In 1921, he formed the Hayakawa Feature Play Company which produced four movies. During his heyday in Hollywood, he, and his actress wife Tsuru Aoki would throw lavish parties and dinners at their Hollywood mansion built in the style of a French castle. Hayakawa also owned a gold-plated Pierce-Arrow vehicle. In 1926, he lost in one night nearly a million dollars at a casino in Monte Carlo. The first chapter in Hayakawa’s career ended when the production company closed in 1922.
He made some movies in France in the 1930s, only to have World War II trap him there where he made a modest living as a painter.
May 13th programming commences with Hayakawa’s first Hollywood feature in 18 years, Tokyo Joe (1949), starring Humphrey Bogart. He plays the ruthless Baron Kimura who blackmails Bogey when he returns to Tokyo to transport illegal goods by threatening to expose his ex-wife’s “war crimes.” He even goes as far as kidnapping Joe’s little daughter.
Though he strove to present positive images of Asians, he no longer had the power to do that when he returned to Hollywood. In fact, the New York Times stated his performance was “what might be described as typical Japanese malevolence.” And TCM.com added Kimura was “an indication of the kind of stereotypical villainous roles he was offered at this point in his career.”
One doesn’t envision Hayakawa in a comedy but in 1958 he spoofed his Col. Saito image in the popular Jerry Lewis comedy The Geisha Boy, written and directed by Frank Tashlin. Lewis plays a hapless magician on tour in Japan with his rabbit Harry. Lewis falls in love with a beautiful translator (Nobu McCarthy). Hayakawa plays her father and in one sequence he’s dressed in a military uniform supervising the building of a small bridge over the family’s pool. The workers even hum “Colonel Bogey March.” There’s a clip of The Bridge on the River Kwai star Alec Guinness and a fun exchange between Lewis and Hayakawa joking about the fact that he looks like “that actor.”
The final film on May 13th is 1931’s Daughter of the Dragon, starring the first female Hollywood Asian star, Chinese American Anna May Wong. She plays the daughter of the infamous Dr. Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu dies, his daughter vows to continue his revenge on the wealthy British family Fu believed caused the death of his wife and son. Hayakawa plays a Chinese detective who has travelled to London to find Fu Manchu. He falls in love with Wong’s Princess Ling Moy without realizing she is the late villain’s daughter.
Samuel Fuller’s entertaining House of Bamboo, a 1955 crime drama set in Tokyo starring Robert Ryan and Robert Stack kicks off the May 20th programming. But it isn’t really a showcase for Hayakawa’s talents, unfortunately. He has a throwaway role as a police detective and he is even dubbed by Richard Loo.
The second feature, Green Mansions, a 1959 fantasy set in the jungles of Venezuela, casts him as Audrey Hepburn's father. He has some strong scenes in 1960’s Hell to Eternity as a Japanese general who orders sick and wounded soldiers to muster their strength to fight the U.S. troops. Jeffrey Hunter, who plays a real-life World War II hero, confronts the general, berating him for sending these troops into battle. As he commits harakiri, the general gives an emotional speech to his troops telling them to surrender. The movie may be uneven and overlong, but Hayakawa makes it worth watching. Hell to Eternity also marks the last film of Aoki, who died the following year.
The Memorial Day (May 27th) programming commences with 1950’s World War II drama Three Came Home, starring Claudette Colbert and Hayakawa. Based on the 1947 best-selling memoir by Agnes Newton Keith, the drama chronicles her harrowing three-year experience with her son in a brutal women’s POW camp. She was the only American living with her British husband and her young son in North Borneo when Japan invaded. Hayakawa plays the Japanese colonel who takes an interest in Colbert because he loved the book she wrote about Borneo. Still, he is vicious to the prisoners and even abandons her when she undergoes various tortures in the camp. There is a particular chilling sequence in which they are having a conversation in his office while the Japanese captors are shooting people.
And what more can one say about The Bridge on the River Kwai? It’s just as brilliant as it was when it was released in 1957. The between Oscar-winning Guinness as the ramrod, by-the-book Colonel Nicholson and the ruthless Saito is something for the ages.
Besides Hell to Eternity, Hayakawa appeared in the 1960 Disney blockbuster, Swiss Family Robinson, guest-starred in a 1963 episode of Route 66, and was the voice of the Mole in the animated 1966 The Daydreamer. His final film was 1967’s “Junjô nijûsô.”
He spent his last years in Tokyo in a small house teaching acting and becoming a Zen priest. In 1960, he wrote the book, “Zen Showed Me the Way.” He died in 1973 at the age of 87.
“Destiny has brought me much,” he wrote in his book. “She has been kind. But it has been left to me to fashion the acumen of deeds in the pattern destiny has drawn, to solve the great koan of life for myself.”
