I saw this as the feature for the third day of the 39th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, and while I'm happy to see any of star Sessue Hayakawa's silent films, this one is terribly melodramatic, and it's basically a white slavery film, an early exploitation genre, in the mold of "Traffic in Souls" (1913), but with supposedly-Chinese characters and set in San Francisco's Chinatown. The Chinese slave of this one is even evidently played by a white, American actress, Gloria Payton, in addition to Hayakawa and, reportedly, much of the rest of the cast being Japanese. There's so much cultural appropriation going on here that it's hard to keep track; moreover, a major theme of the picture concerns the culture clash between supposed Chinese values, which mostly consists here of arranged marriage and smuggling slaves, while Hayakawa's character's adoption of supposed Western mores is exemplified by gambling, as well as marrying for love, I guess.
The low point may be when Hayakawa's character purchases his enslaved love interest on a 3-year layaway agreement. The surviving print of this one, while appreciably restored, is also choppy, either from missing footage today or poor editing in the first place. The protagonist's father declares that he'll do everything he can to prevent his son from completing his purchase, but we never see the father again in the film. Another character is stabbed, I gather, but instead of showing that (which apparently was thought too scandalous for a racist film about human trafficking), the film cuts to the next scene where the weapon employed is delivered to Hayakawa. Granted, the prior scene includes a shadow cast on a door to announce a figure's entry, though. And, while the climax is basically a Griffith-esque race-against-time set-up to prevent the rape of the damsel-in-distress, with the added misfortune of some white saviors thrown in, the fight sequence is amusingly staged in its excess. At about an hour and eight minutes, it's a mercifully short feature, too. All in all, this Hollywood treatment of the Chinese was a stark contrast to Pordenone's prior night's feature, the Chinese propaganda piece on their own "National Customs" (Guo Feng) (1935).
(Note: 2017 restoration from the National Film Archive, Tokyo, of 35mm nitrate positive. Unfortunately, Pordenone's streaming of it included a distracting watermark in the lower right corner for the Archive.)
