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SESSUE HAYAKAWA: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. By Daisuke Miayo. Durham (NC) and London (UK): Duke University Press, 2007. xvi, 379 pp. (Illus.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 987-08223-3969-4.
Those of us of a certain age remember the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) for his Oscar-nominated supporting role as Colonel Saito in the David Lean-directed film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), but few of us are aware that Hayakawa was one of the world's leading silent film stars from the mid-1910s into the 1920s. Daisuke Miyao's compelling and essential study of Hayakawa explores the actor's early stardom with an analysis that situates him at the crossroads of a variety of cultural discourses that required a constant negotiation of his cinematic and personal identities.
The first chapter of the book discusses Hayakawa's films from 1914-1915, including his "breakout" film, The Cheat (1915), in which he played Tori, a cultivated art dealer, who befriends and then sexually...