Review by John Adams

Watching any film from the silent era (1900-1929 ) is a little like looking in on an alien world. The things that might be seen as exotic to the original viewers pass unnoticed, and the unimportant details are so strange to our eye that we see only them. This is even more apparent when the silent film itself was made as a window onto an alien world. The modern viewer may glide right by the same Japanese sets and costumes that amazed the original audience but then be stymied by a White man unconvincingly playing an elderly Japanese master artist, or the hero painting in a well known national park.

It stars a very young Sessue Hayakawa, the same man who 43 years later would receive an Academy nomination for his role as Col. Saito in David Lean's Bridge Over the River Kwai. It is an American film that was for the time atypically non-racist in its depiction of the Japanese, perhaps because Hayakawa produced the film himself and was co-owner along with director William Worthington of the production company (Haworth) that made it. This is an amazing restoration of a heretofore lost film. The restoration aspect alone makes this DVD worth watching.

Milestone Films has also added a set of PDF files of additional notes and a press kit for The Dragon Painter, an excerpt from a forthcoming book on Thomas Ince entitled "Hollywood's First Asian Cycle," the entire screenplay for Wrath of the Gods and the complete novel "The Dragon Painter" with original illustrations.

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