Jon Mirsalis on Piano Although he is best remembered today for his role as the infamous Colonel Saito in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa was a Hollywood leading man in the silent film era. The Dragon Painter was produced by Haworth Pictures Corp., Hayakawa's own production company, formed to showcase the unique talents of Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, his lovely wife. Beautifully photographed in Yosemite Valley, The Dragon Painter is a fantasy-allegory about love and longing as a source of creative inspiration. Hayakawa portrays Tatsu, a free-spirit painter who longs for and then finds Umeko (Aoki), his "dragon princess." Tatsu finds that the price of domestic bliss is his will to create. A contemporary reviewer in 1919 observed, "It gives us a refreshing whiff of originality and takes us off the road of stereotyped movie mixtures to give us a whole blessed hour in the clouds...The acting of Hayakawa reaches perfection. The character he portrays is fascinating-a fawn-like creature with such a great amount of vitality that he needs the whole outdoors to move about in." This restored print of The Dragon Painter was copied from a tinted nitrate print circulated in France at the time of the film's original release. Possessing only French intertitles, it was recopied onto color safety film and recently re-translated to English. Stephen Gong