DVD Review: THE DRAGON PAINTER
For film fans, not much compares to the excitement of a new discovery. As Martin Scorsese reminds us, too many movies have been lost or destroyed, so here’s the latest find to get excited about: the newly restored 1919 silent classic The Dragon Painter, now on DVD.
Milestone Films, the folks that proudly offer restored DVDs for
I Am Cuba and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep has reintroduced this feature, important not only artistically, but for its meaning to Asian-Americans in the early 20th Century.
It all started with a man named Sessue Hayakawa (right). Nearly 40 years before gaining recognition for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the Japanese-born actor broke barriers by co-creating Haworth Pictures with director William Worthington. The Haworth partnership was probably the first film entity to bring Asian artistry and culture to the Western audience — and the first to portray Asians as something other than villains.
In The Dragon Painter, Hayakawa plays the title role, Tatsu, the tortured artist. In tinted scenes — restored by the George Eastman House — Tatsu hides in the mountains painting, driven by the madness that his long-lost fiancée has been taken from him and turned into a dragon. He may be talented, but he’s nuts.
When master painter Indara gets a look at Tatsu’s work, he figures he’s found his next true disciple. But there’s only one catch: the primitive Tatsu only excels with his missing mate as his mental muse. Enter Indara’s humble daughter (Hayakawa’s real-life wife, Tsuru Aoki) and a mind game or two.
As with many films of the silent era, the storyline doesn’t delve into any unexpected complexities, especially with a 50-minute running time. But the magic is in imagining the film’s production, letting the tinted photography transport you to film’s formative years, just a decade or so from the fantasies of Melies.
Hayakawa and Aoki play well inside the silent medium, mixing melodrama with intensity and tenderness. The pair would appear in 37 films together through the early 1920s, including the 1914 disaster movie The Wrath of the Gods, included in the DVD for The Dragon Painter (recommended, and more interesting than The Dragon Painter).
With today’s sensibilities, The Dragon Painter comes across as generally quaint. But for those with a sense of history, it’s as important as other features of that time, if only for the efforts spent to restore it and make it available.
Purchase The Dragon Painter DVD on Amazon.com
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