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Cheat, The 1915
Fannie Ward stars as a hysteric spoiled upper class lady using charity money money for gambling. She looses everything and has to turn to a Japanese businessman visiing he city. He agrees on helping her, but in return he doesn't just want his money returned. They end up in court after she wounded him to fight him off. The Cheat, a silent classic from 1915, is still contemporary. The story focusses on the aristocracy with all its taboos and non spoken subjects. The movie was perceived shocking by the critics due to its obvious sexual nature. Cecil B. DeMille painstakingly shows the double standards of theupper class moral. Imagine a rape like scene and branding a woman like a piece of cattle in 1915. Even the foreigner (Sessue Hayakawa) is a real foreigner, a rare occurence because most Asians were played by made up white players. DeMille uses special lighting techniques to accentuate facial expressions, at the time a novelty. This lighting technique, better known as Lansky Lighting, after Paramounts cofounder Jesse L. Lansky, eclipses the characters in darkness and illuminates them from one side. The cheat is one of those classics without a remake, meaby in this century a young director will be inspired by the combination of DeMilles genius and Wards immaculate performance.
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producer | Lasky, Jesse | screenwriter | Macpherson, Jeanie |
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duration | 64 |
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color | No |
sound | No |
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genre | drama |
country | USA |
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