The Cheat (1915)

The Cheat, made for Famous Players-Lasky in 1915, is a very very early Cecil B. DeMille silent melodrama. It’s the movie that first got DeMille noticed as a major directing talent.

DeMille knew he had a story with potential but it needed work. He made sweeping changes to the original screenplay. His instincts were correct.

Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward) is married to stockbroker Richard Hardy (Jack Dean). Edith is a wildly extravagant social butterfly. She thinks nothing of spending $600 on a single dress. Remember, this was 1915. I have no idea how much that would equate to today but it would certainly be tens of thousands of dollars. Edith is irritated that her husband is so tiresome about her habit of spending money that he doesn’t have.

Edith chairs a charity committee raising money for Belgian refugees. So far $10,000 has been raised. Edith gets a hot stock tip so she decides to “borrow” the $10,000 to play the market. She loses the whole lot.

In desperation she asks her friend, the well-known Japanese ivory dealer Hishuru Tori (Sessue Hayakawa) for help. She needs to get her hands on $10,000 immediately, otherwise she and her husband will be ruined and disgraced.

He agrees to give her the $10,000, but there will be a price. The price will be the use of her body.

There’s an early scene in which Hishuru Tori is marking his ivory statuettes with a branding iron, as a sign that they belong to him. We will soon discover that he adopts the same approach with his women.

At the exact moment that Edith is closing the deal to sell herself to the ivory dealer her husband makes a killing on the stock market. Suddenly they’re rich. She tells him that she needs ten grand right away and he gives her the money without asking any questions. Now she can buy herself back from Hishuru Tori but the ivory dealer isn’t having any of this. She made a deal with him and he doesn’t intend to be cheated. Now things get really melodramatic and it all culminates in a shooting, followed by a trial.

One of the things I notice about DeMille’s silent pictures (and I’ve seen quite a few of them) is that the acting is fairly naturalistic. There’s not a huge amount of the exaggerated acting style that so many people associate with silent movies. Fannie Ward succumbs to the temptation at times but this is after all a melodrama. The acting of Sessue Hayakawa and Jack Dean is very naturalistic.

It’s intriguing to note that in the original 1915 release the character played by Sessue Hayakawa is named Hishuru Tori and he’s Japanese. When it was re-released in 1918 his nationality was changed to Burmese and his name was changed to Haka Arakau. Sessue Hayakawa was of course Japanese. Either way this rôle made him a major Hollywood star.

Of course you have to remember that was 1915. The camera doesn’t move. That’s true of all movies in the early silent era. F.W. Murnau is usually given the credit for being the first director to move the camera during a shot but that was not until the early 1920s. It is however obvious that DeMille was aware of the danger that the picture would be too static so he does his best to introduce as much movement as possible into his shots. The actors move around constantly and enter and leave the shot. He was also aware of the need to introduce a sense of movement through the editing. DeMille does use a pan in one vital scene and because this was a technique that wasn’t used very often in 1915 it has an impact.

He also does his best to make every shot as visually interesting as possible. The shot compositions are always interesting.

It’s interesting that DeMille makes very sparing use of title cards. He uses them only when it’s absolutely necessary. Even at this early stage of his career he was confident of his ability to tell a story through visual means. DeMille had a theatrical background but he understood that theatre and film have little in common and that film is a purely visual medium. He understood that if a director knows what he’s doing there is no need to be told exactly what is being said. He trusts the audience to figure out what’s going on.

This movie really doesn’t feel clunky, whereas a movie like A Fool There Was (made in the same year) does look clunky. In technical terms The Cheat feels much much more modern.

Filming a suspenseful courtroom scene without any dialogue is a challenge but DeMille is equal to the challenge.

The cinematography (by Alvin Wyckoff) is impressive with bold use of shadows and very low lighting. Quite an achievement given the limitations of the film stock in use in 1915.

One of the cool things about this movie is seeing the women wearing Edwardian evening gowns and realising that this was not a costume picture. The clothing was contemporary. This is what women were wearing when the movie was made.

This movie was of course made years before such horrors as the Production Code were even thought of. The movie does not judge Edith quite as harshly as she would have been judged under the Production Code. She has made a foolish mistake and she is spoilt and irresponsible and not particularly honest but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is irredeemably wicked.

When seeing this movie you have to avoid the temptation to get sidetracked into obsessing over the racial and social attitudes of 1915. The movie reflects the attitudes of its time. If you want to appreciate the movie you need to set aside 21st century attitudes.

And even though this is very much melodrama there is some subtlety. Edith has brought her problems upon herself. She did, quite willingly, agree to sell herself. She is, as the movie’s title implies, a cheat.

The Cheat was a major step forward for Hollywood film-making, both technically and thematically. The frank treatment of the sexual subject matter is very much in the manner of pre-code movies but DeMille had already reached that point fifteen years earlier. The Cheat was one of the movies that indicated that maybe movies should be taken seriously as an art form. This was a very important movie. It’s also an incredibly entertaining movie.

The Cheat was released on DVD by Kino Video as a double feature paired with DeMille’s 1922 melodrama Manslaughter.

The Cheat is highly recommended.