and even though Hayakawa is praised, he is nevertheless demeaned as a "yellow heavy." Similarly, Ed Park (3) commented that in The Cheat, "the premise of a flesh-marking foreigner is textbook xenophobic."
Gina Marchetti (9) points out that the film illustrates Hollywood's interest in interracial sexuality. In the film, "the threat of rape forms the backdrop for the exploration of other issues involving not only racial differences, but also questions of class, consumption, morality, and aesthetics." Also, as a rape fantasy, a not so virtuous Caucasian woman is being dominated by a villainous Asian man. Marchetti (10) states that "with roots deep within the Euro-American melodramatic tradition, these fantasies present the white woman as the innocent object of lust and token of the fragility of the West's own sense of moral purity." The Cheat "xenophobically calls for the exclusion of color from the American bourgeois mainstream" (Marchetti 11).
Interestingly, when it was released theatrically, audiences who viewed The Cheat would cry out in support of a mob that nearly lynches the Asian villain. He was shot by the woman he branded and her husband was put on trial for this attack, because he wanted to protect his wife. The villain was transformed into a victim and yet his actions have been so heinous that he cannot be tolerated. In the seminal courtroom scene, Edith Hardy, the branded woman, reveals her brand and any sympathy that might have existed for her attacker is dissipated. Marchetti (15) maintains that the courtroom crowd recalls lynch mobs that killed African-Americans in the American South and the Japanese villain is depicted as a person who is not worthy of justice.
Marchetti (17) claims that this film appears "to serve the same double function as warnings to women that their independence leads to their humiliation" and to "people of color that their desire to assimilate into the American mainstream wi...