Reviews

The ending is so incredibly notable and disturbing as the cadets form into a vigilante force, pointedly identified as a Ku Klux Klan of sort by Jocko. And because of his earlier threat of lynching Simmons, the scene is made ever more terrifying as the uniformed group dragged him blind-folded across the foggy woods, only to reveal that they are dumping him in the "colored" section of a train, among a few Black passengers. I'd be extremely curious to know if the film was supposed to end with an actual lynching, given the setting in the woods almost ripe for hanging, but due to censorship issues ended up implying this "gruesome" (to use the queer writer character Perrin's word) end with an expel that racializes him as Black.

An unusual Hollywood Orientalist production in which both the female and male lead were cast in yellowface but oftentimes dressed in Western attire, a fact that makes their yellowface makeup even more artificial or otherwise indistinguishable. Edward G. Robinson's almost "minimalist" yellowface makeup surely belongs to the latter group. It looks as if he is just playing in a sequel to Little Caesar (1931), despite the extensive use of close-ups that emphasize the flatness of his face and the added-on epicanthal ("Mongolian") fold. The plot on the Tong wars was definitely riding on the gangster cycle from the year before. In order not to make their yellowface performance look too artificial, Caucasian actors in yellowface were used even in supporting roles and extras, which arguably achieves the opposite. The wife's lover Harry En Hai played by Leslie Fenton (who played in The Public Enemy a year ago) in yellowface creates an almost uncanny effect, not (only) because it blurs the boundary between two races, but between human face and mask, in other words, between the organic and inorganic, life and death. It is most telling in the last scene of the film, in which his head is pinned to a wall by the hatchet, and his lifeless body accentuates the mask-like quality of his face covered by the caked yellowface makeup. There is of course a gender difference here, for Loretta Young's makeup is probably not less heavy and caked. But in an era of Art Deco aesthetics, Young's Asian makeup paradoxically emphasizes her whiteness, as well as the versatility of whiteness, facilitated by the most advanced makeup products and techniques. The fact that she can be seen, as much as in her first appearance in film, dressed in modern Western attire WHILE playing an Oriental supposedly convincingly (by the Art Deco standard) testifies to this racial ideology that entertains both "the permeability and intransigence of the racial divide."

Despite the problematic ideology -- westerner/christianity as the savior instead of invader and the vilifying of Oriental religions as well as people, the film is amazing in its spectacles of natural disasters (typhoon, fire, volcano), the extraordinary performance of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, and the representation of cross-racial romantic relationship. The last one, although framed as the success of western domination in the story, is a rare case of cross-racial love that has a happy ending, unlike the countless films in which the Asian girls will eventually and almost inevitably die as a gesture of sacrifice and the token of the impossibility of cross-racial love. Also, there is a brief kissing scene between Tsuru Aoki and Frank Borzage (!), which makes the relationship even rarer since cross-racial kissing was supposed to be a visual taboo.