The Cheat anticipated the full-bore Orientalism that came to dominance after the Great War. Produced and directed by DeMille for Famous Players-Lasky (soon to be incorporated as Paramount Pictures), it was shot by Alvin Wyckoff, a pioneer cinematographer who helped define the craft, and written by Hector Turnbull, a New York reporter who followed the money to California, and Jeanie MacPherson, actress, director, screenwriter, and DeMille mistress. Silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, in his books Behind the Mask of Innocence, calls The Cheat “one of the most sensational films of the early cinema,” and no wonder: the plot traffics in interracial coupling, sadomasochistic desire, and lynch-mob anarchy. Unlike The Birth of a Nation, The Cheat is known mainly to film buffs and scholars of Asian American studies, which is a pity.Ī brilliantly realized, sexually charged melodrama from a director whose name would soon become synonymous with a very different kind of Hollywood film, The Cheat reveals an astonishingly different DeMille, not the grand conductor of a cast of thousands, orchestrating lush pageantry and pretending to embrace Judeo-Christianity while wallowing in pagan idolatry, but an artist who might have gone on to direct moody film noirs or slow-burn melodramas. ![]() DeMille’s The Cheat, released in December 1915. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) have inevitably overshadowed the centenary of another racially charged masterpiece of the early silent screen, Cecil B. THE CELEBRATIONS - scratch that, commemorations - attending the 100th anniversary of D.
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