A Film Canon

This extraordinary film supplements DeMille's strengths - (relative) naturalism, an ability to evoke various points of view, if not always exhibit point-of-view shots per se (particularly in the final courtroom scene), and a depiction of his characters' inner lives through superimposed thought-bubbles - with a cinematographic vision to rival expressionism, in the form of a recurrent tableau in which hyperbolic, ivory light is shrouded in a darkness that is no longer a mere backdrop, as in in earlier silent films, but a textured, smoky medium with a threatening autonomy of its own. In the first half of the film, this frames the most lurid moments in Edith Hardy's (Fannie Ward) liason with Hishuru Tori (Sessue Hayakawa), a Japanese merchant - most memorably in a sequence in which Tori successively turns off the various sources illuminating Edith's prostrate body, the last of which also details a smoking shrine to Buddha. However, by the second half this tableau has become independent of the action, which moves in and out of the spotlight, rather than simply being framed by it, frequently leaving the viewer just on the verge of witnessing what is occurring, and producing an exquisite voyeuristic experience. As with DeMille's later marriage-manuals, Hardy's liason - and the infidelity that it involves - is fused into a single romantic-financial entity, whose subtext is a palpable anxiety about the promiscuous, indiscriminate flow of capital - both locally, in her actions, and globally, in the murky circumstances that have allowed a Japanese man to wield such power in American mileux.