Was it someone's idea of an inside joke to cast Lee Tracy in a "Yellow Peril" movie? The Georgia-born, Pennsylvania-raised actor had spent much of his early years in uniform - military school, service in World War I, and a stint as a semi-pro baseball player - before becoming one of Hollywood's great iconoclasts, both onscreen and off. His star-making turn as fast-talking newsman Hildy Johnson in Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur's Broadway smash The Front Page got the attention of Hollywood; though he would lose the role of Hildy to Pat O'Brien in Lewis Milestone's 1931 film adaptation of The Front Page, Tracy became Hollywood's go-to guy for playing wisecracking reporters. Loose-limbed and tart-tongued, Tracy was hard to hate, even when he played against type, doing dirt to Ann Dvorak in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) and manipulating Jean Harlow to do his bidding in Bombshell (1933). Tracy was at the height of his popularity as an MGM star when he got into trouble during the Mexico shoot for Viva Villa! (1934). Though the facts have long been a bone of contention, the official story - that a drunken Tracy urinated out of a hotel window and hit a passing military parade - got him booted from the country and canned at Metro. After bouncing from studio to studio as a free agent, Tracy eventually wound up starring in programmers churned out on Poverty Row.

Real estate investments had made Tracy a wealthy man, giving him the freedom to work when he pleased, and to take time off to serve his country in World War II. (A second lieutenant in the First World War, Tracy rose to the rank of first lieutenant in his posting to Michigan's Fort Custer, where he was assigned to the military police.) The actor's first film upon returning to Hollywood was Betrayal from the East (1945), shot at RKO. Inspired by the non-fiction bestseller by Alan Hynd ("The Inside Story of Japanese Spies in America"), the film took a fictive spin on two true crime case histories, of the recruitment of former Navy men, fallen on hard times, by Japanese nationals charged by Emperor Hirohito with obtaining US military secrets. Though deep into his forties at the time and seeming a bit long in the tooth to play the dashing Hollywood hero, Tracy was younger than his real life counterpart. Former Navy yeoman and Hollywood bit player Al D. Blake was fifty when, while playing "Keeno, King of the Robots" in a department store window, he was recruited for espionage by friend Toraichi Kono. Blake had met Kono years earlier when he played a small role in Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918), while the Japanese national was working as Chaplin's valet. Desperate for money but true to his country, Blake pretended to go along with the plan, obtaining useless intelligence for Kono and his associates before the law was able to swoop in and ankle the spy ring.

None of this backstory is in evidence in Betrayal from the East, a government issue wartime propaganda tale in which the Blake character is not an actor but a down-at-heel carnival barker whose military experience makes him a valuable asset to Nipponese spy Kato (Philip Ahn, whose Korean ancestry did not prevent him from playing agents of the Yellow Peril in Behind the Rising Sun and The Purple Heart). Though RKO starlet Bonita Granville had been announced in The Hollywood Reporter as having signed to play Tracy's love interest, the part was filled by Nancy Kelly, a former child star turned second tier leading lady (perhaps most notably as the beleaguered mother of The Bad Seed in 1957). Trucked in to contribute peripheral villainy were such reliable Hollywood exotics as Richard Loo, Victor Sen-Yung (both Chinese-Americans) and Abner Biberman. Brought onboard to add a measure of verisimilitude was columnist Drew Pearson, whose stentorian tones would later be put to effective use in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950).

Back to Toraichi Kono. Scion of a wealthy Hiroshima family, Kono disappointed his father's aspirations for him by gravitating toward the fast lane. Sent to Seattle to be disciplined by an older relative, Kono drifted instead to Hollywood, where he dabbled in aviation and answered a job listing placed by Charlie Chaplin, who was in need of a chauffeur. Kono eventually became more than a driver to Chaplin; while playing bit parts in several of his films, Kono staffed the filmmaker's estate with his own countrymen and developed a reputation for being Chaplin's gatekeeper, a conduit through which the rest of the industry was expected to pass if they wanted facetime with the Little Tramp. Kono's relationship to his employer was strained by Chaplin's marriage to Paulette Goddard and sundered when Kono attempted to curtail Goddard's spending. At one point given rein of United Artist's Tokyo office, Kono's embroilment in the espionage scandal that served as the inspiration for Betrayal from the East resulted in his internment for the duration of World War II. Despite the severity of the charges against him, Kono was in effect a free man in peacetime, traveling back and forth between Japan and the United States until his death from natural causes in 1971. A documentary on Kono's life, Living in Silence is currently in development.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

The Enemy Within: A History of Spies, Spymasters, and Espionage by Terry Crowdy (Osprey Publishing, 2011)
In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror by Michelle Malkin (Regnery Publishing, 2004)
Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Homefront (Oxford University Press, 1995)
"Mr. Kono and the Tramp" by Bruce Wallace, Los Angeles Times, April 16,