I was looking forward to the convenience of this day. After seeing one film starting 2pm, we would spend a whopping three more movies in the same movie theater. Yay! A nice person even went through the ranks to see our tickets so that we didn’t even have to get off our seats while we waited about half an hour for “Jujiro” to start, the last film of the day. (Much unlike the Friedrichstadtpalast who throws everybody out despite having a huge staff. Next to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, I vow to avoid the Friedrichstadtpalast in the future as much as I can.) Finally, we’d be done for the day at around 9pm. It was the perfect schedule, but sadly not the perfect day.
The Cheat
USA 1915, Cecil B. DeMille, 59’
Edith Hardy, a bored, socialite housewife spends too much time with Tori, a rich Japanese dude with nothing to do, while spending all of her husband’s hard-earned money. At some point, she speculates with 10,000 dollars she collected from her group of friends for charity and loses the money. Tori offers to give the money to her, but only if she gives herself to him. Mrs. Hardy is horrified.
Death count: 1.
I knew about Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes. It’s a fun thing, especially this year where it stirred a new controversy about Woody Allen’s family troubles. Apart from that, I have never felt very compelled to watch one of his films, fully knowing that he’s one of the major players who pioneered film-making. After seeing “The Cheat”, it is not only fascinating that he was one of the first, but that – just like George Méliès – he was so incredibly good at it. From the standpoint of an artist, “The Cheat” is absolutely beautiful. The scenes at Tori’s house are wonderfully moody and creepy, the film’s story is suspenseful and every single shot in the film seems to have the perfect length and looks perfectly right. It’s a very classic film, but it seems like for these beginnings, DeMille has figured it all out, effectively setting a standard of how films are shot for the time. Yes, there is a “good” way and a “bad” way to make films in the classical sense, and you can make errors in film-making just like you can in music composition (Mozart famously loved to point out his father’s mistakes at early age). Of course you can throw away all these rules at some point, but to do that the rules must exist. As for DeMille, I’d say his work is setting the rules and he’s a master at it.
Other than that, the storyline doesn’t really make sense. At first, Edith and Tori are shown as having this very friendly relationship where he is this extremely trusted family friend who essentially acts like a gay man around all these women. Then all of a sudden he requests sex for money and threatens her even though theoretically all he needed to do at that point was to give her the money and then charm her into sleeping with him. She would have done that in a heartbeat, no doubt about that. But no, they had to portray him as this brutal rapist who uses violence when he could have gotten what he wanted by asking nicely. Well, that’s the Western world in the 1910’s for you. I won’t really complain but to today’s eyes, it’s really disturbing to see. In the end I was torn between “Wow, this film is really well-made” and “The racism in this story is creeps me out”.