Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom by Daisuke Miyao

Author:Daisuke Miyao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

When Ahmed first appears in the film, his costume, a black T-shirt, white scarf, and white short pants, does not emphasize his Egyptianness. Instead, Hayakawa’s makeup emphasizes Ahmed’s white skin color and distinguishes him from other sub-characters, who are allocated positions inferior to Ahmed’s. Wassef, another Arabian servant of Darwin, has darker makeup and wears a tarboosh. Ahmed contemptuously bribes a black guard who is depicted as lazy, falling into sleep right after Ahmed leaves. Ahmed forces an Egyptian dancer, embodying the sensual image of the orient with her halfnaked costume and erotic dance of poses from ancient Egyptian paintings, to light his cigarette and treats her like a child.

Moreover, Ahmed is clearly distinguished from the Arab villain, Pasha, who is played by a white actor, Fred Jones. Jones’s racial masquerade exaggerates the stereotypically oriental characteristics of Pasha. He wears luxurious oriental clothes, including a tarboosh, and has a dark beard. His room is filled with oriental objects, such as Arabian tapestries. From a dark and dirty hasheesh den, full of addicted Arabs and black guards who brutally harass them, Pasha recruits drug addicts to assault white people. Pasha is, more than anything else, a sexual threat to white women and an embodiment of the anxiety of miscegenation. Pasha kidnaps Eleanor, Darwin’s fiancée, and attacks her.

In contrast, Ahmed differentiates himself from Pasha in his relationship to matrimony. Ahmed’s loyalty to his fiancée, Zinah, signifies his monogamist morality, even when he is allowed four wives “by the Prophet” in Egypt. In this sense, Ahmed is depicted as a Westernized (Americanized) and civilized man who pursues the “normative” model of heterosexual romance.

Moreover, Ahmed’s physical strength, which is emphasized in this film, links Hayakawa to such contemporary white American action heroes as Douglas Fairbanks Sr. In fact, An Arabian Knight is a chivalry action film similar to such Fairbanks Sr. star vehicles as His Majesty, the American (1919) and The Mark of Zorro (1920).75 When pursuing an enemy, Ahmed jumps out of a second-story window. He catches up with the enemy and shakes him violently to make him confess where he has hidden Eleanor. In another scene, Ahmed reaches up to the second-story window from the back of his donkey. In the climactic battle, he fights alone against many enemies on a staircase. After murdering Pasha, Ahmed jumps out of the window, climbs up a wall, jumps on a horse, and rides away. With his physical strength, Ahmed self-sacrificially fights against his ethnic fellow Egyptians for the sake of a white family.

Finally, Ahmed is depicted as a receptive person when it comes to his relationship with women, which emphasizes his sexually unthreatening nature. George’s sister Cordelia believes that Ahmed is a reincarnation of her prince of two thousand years ago and makes him look like it. Ahmed functions as an oriental object to be consumed by a white middle-class woman.76 Cordelia symbolizes New Women who actively engage in consumer culture. In her introductory shot, she wears an oriental cape and ornaments and stands in front of a tapestry with an Egyptian design.

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