The Tong Man
1919 · 47 min
The Tong Man (1919): Sessue Hayakawa as a hatchet man who will not take the contract, in a picture his own studio made. Watch the silent film free online.
Hayakawa plays a tong assassin ordered to kill a merchant whose daughter he is in love with, and the film belongs to him completely. The stillness, the held pauses, the sense of a man doing arithmetic behind a blank face. He was one of the biggest stars in America at the time, and one of very few Asian actors ever handed a picture to carry.
He also owned it. Hayakawa founded Haworth Pictures in 1918 so he could stop taking the parts other people wrote for him, and this came early in its run. William Worthington directed.
Its Chinatown is a back-lot invention of opium and secret societies, and it plays exactly that way now. Hayakawa is the reason to sit down with it.
Free to watch via wikimedia.