A further discussion of this theme on other planes will be found in the eleventh chapter, entitled “Architecture-in-Motion,” and the fifteenth chapter, entitled “The Substitute for the Saloon.”

CHAPTER VI

PATRIOTIC SPLENDOR

The Patriotic Picture need not necessarily be in terms of splendor.  It generally is.  Beginning the chronicle is one that waves no banners.

The Typhoon, a film produced by Thomas H. Ince, is a story of the Japanese love of Nippon in which a very little of the landscape of the nation is shown, and that in the beginning.  The hero (acted by Sessue Hayakawa), living in the heart of Paris, represents the far-off Empire.  He is making a secret military report.  He is a responsible member of a colony of Japanese gentlemen.  The bevy of them appear before or after his every important action.  He still represents this crowd when alone.

The unfortunate Parisian heroine, unable to fathom the mystery of the fanatical hearts of the colony, ventures to think that her love for the Japanese hero and his equally great devotion to her is the important human relation on the horizon.  She flouts his obscure work, pits her charms against it.  In the end there is a quarrel.  The irresistible meets the immovable, and in madness or half by accident, he kills the girl.

The youth is protected by the colony, for he alone can make the report.  He is the machine-like representative of the Japanese patriotic formula, till the document is complete.  A new arrival in the colony, who obviously cannot write the book, confesses the murder and is executed.  The other high fanatic dies soon after, of a broken heart, with the completed manuscript volume in his hand.  The one impression of the play is that Japanese patriotism is a peculiar and fearful thing.  The particular quality of the private romance is but vaguely given, for such things in their rise and culmination can only be traced by the novelist, or by the gentle alternations of silence and speech on the speaking stage, aided by the hot blood of players actually before us.

Here, as in most photoplays, the attempted lover-conversations in pantomime are but indifferent things.  The details of the hero’s last quarrel with the heroine and the precise thoughts that went with it are muffled by the inability to speak.  The power of the play is in the adequate style the man represents the colony.  Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japanese tales more adapted to the films.  We should have stories of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi, written from the ground up for the photoplay theatre.  We should have the story of the Forty-seven Ronin, not a Japanese stage version, but a work from the source-material.  We should have legends of the various clans, picturizations of the code of the Samurai.

The Typhoon is largely indoors.  But the Patriotic Motion Picture is generally a landscape.  This is for deeper reasons than that it requires large fields in which to manoeuvre armies.  Flags are shown for other causes than that they are the nominal signs of a love of the native land.