Abstract
Abstract This chapter focuses on multiple versions of the Madame Butterfly narrative in Hollywood film and on multiple versions of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 silent film The Cheat. One focus is on the relationship between music in these films and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and on how the Butterfly narrative was reworked to project developing perceptions of race and gender. The relationship between operatic and cinematic Orientalist representation is explored in the 1932 Madame Butterfly and the 1962 My Geisha. DeMille’s “The Cheat” inspired works stoking fears of the “Yellow Peril.” The story was transformed into a play (1918). Camille Erlanger’s “Forfaiture,” the first opera to be based on a film, premiered in Paris (1921). A silent film was released in 1923 and a sound film in 1931. In 1937, a French film starred Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who played the “villain” in 1915. This offers an opportunity to compare the role of music and realization of Orientalism in four genres.
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