Japanese Characters in Film

When she threatens to kill herself rather than tranquillity with him, he hands her a dagger and then brands his elevate with his personal stamp. According to Tom Doherty (47), "DeMille recognizes cinematically, if not in intertitles, that a sexual tryst with Tori would not quite be a fate worse than death. Variety praised Hayakawa as 'one of the best scandalmongering heavies the screen has seen.'" The very terminology indicates the attitude of critics at that cadence toward Japanese actors and even though Hayakawa is praised, he is nevertheless demeaned as a "yellow heavy." Similarly, Ed Park (3) commented that in The Cheat, "the assumption of a flesh-marking foreigner is textbook xenophobic."

Gina Marchetti (9) points out that the film illustrates Hollywood's care in interracial sexuality. In the film, "the threat of rape forms the backcloth for the exploration of other issues involving not only racial differences, except also questions of class, consumption, morality, and aesthetics." Also, as a rape fantasy, a not so virtuous Caucasian woman is being rule by a villainous Asian man. Marchetti (10) states that "with roots intricate within the Euro-American melodramatic tradition, these fantasies present the white woman as the innocent object of lust and token of the fragility of the West's take in sense of moral purity." The Cheat "xenophobically calls for the exclusion of color from the American bourgeois mainstream" (Marchetti 11).

Interestingly, when it was released

Available at www.villagevoice.com/film/02229,park, 365.

Park, Ed. "Brand Identity." The Village Voice, July 2002.

Cobb, Nora O. "Behind the Inscrutable Half-Shell: Images of

lee side (205) suggests that though Rising Sun did not have the stridence of the novel on which it was based, it nevertheless does depict the Japanese as a perceived threat to American business interests. The yellow Peril has been transformed, for the most part, from a sexual predator into an frugal one. Lee (211) says that in the movie "it is Japanese culture, with its interchangeable minions that is the villain."

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