The Toll of the Sea (Technicolor, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, August 9) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD from Alpha Video Entertainment of the 1922 film The Toll of the Sea, the earliest extant feature-length film in two-strip Technicolor. Directed by Chester Franklin, who got his start making children’s pictures at Fox with his brother Sidney Franklin (who went on to a much more prestigious career as a director than Chester did!), written by Frances Marion (who not only did the script continuity but the intertitles as well), and photographed by Ray Rennahan (Technicolor staff cameraman who got credit on a lot of color films either as full-fledged cinematographer or the obligatory “color consultant” the Technicolor company insisted on working with the prime director of photography on any film that used their process), The Toll of the Sea is an obvious knock-off of Madama Butterfly, though this time it’s set in China instead of Japan. Heroine Lotus Flower (Anna May Wong) is a young woman living in a village on the Chinese seacoast when she spies a young American man, Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlan), drowning in the ocean. She calls out to some nearby fishermen for help rescuing him, and after they save him, nature takes its course and they become lovers. Allen promises to marry Lotus Flower and take her with him to the U.S., but in a scene in an outdoor restaurant/bar/café/whatever he tells his two American friends he has no intention of doing so. Two of Lotus Flower’s Chinese friends, listed in the dramatis personae only as “Gossips” (Ella Lee and Ming Young), warn her that the young Anglo guy is not to be trusted; one of them even tells her that so far she’s had four American “husbands” who all promised to take her with them, only all of them weaseled out of it and she’s still in China and single.

Allen gets a telegram from his father (dated June 15, 1919, the main clue we get as to when this film takes place) saying that his mother is ill and he needs to come home immediately, and naturally Lotus Flower is convinced that she will accompany him. She even dresses in a preposterously old-fashioned outfit she announces that she found in a pattern book she inherited from her grandmother, in one of the film’s few moments of “comic relief.” Alas, Allen tells her at the last minute that she can’t come with him “this time,” and years pass during which Lotus Flower raises the son she and Allen conceived during their idyll. The baby boy is played by a girl, Priscilla Moran, which puts an interesting “spin” on the scene in which one of Lotus Flower’s servants (she’s depicted as affluent enough to have servants, though there’s no indication of just where her money comes from, which I found annoying; Alfred Hitchcock once said he didn’t like making period films because “I don’t know how the characters make their livings or go to the bathroom”) is bathing “him” and we see the kid naked, albeit thoroughly sudsed up, from the waist up. Several years pass – we’re not told how many years but the child looks about five in the later scenes – and Allen eventually returns to the Chinese village, only this time he’s with an American woman, Barbara, whom he married and settled down with after his return. Barbara is played by Beatrice Bentley, who’s not exactly homely but is so far below Anna May Wong in overall sexiness that I joked, “I think he traded down.” At first Lotus Flower lies about the kid and says he’s the son of an American couple who live next door, but after she and Barbara have a private moment, she tells the truth and asks her and Allen to take the boy and raise him as their own. Lotus Flower tells her son that she’s really a Chinese nurse and she’s only pretended to be his mom, and he should go with Allen and Barbara and treat her as his mother. Then she throws herself into the sea and drowns herself on the very same stretch of beach where she rescued Allen lo those many years ago.

Reportedly Anna May Wong told friends as the film was being shot, “This picture will never reach the screen,” though it’s not clear what she meant by that. Either she was sufficiently appalled by the racism of the plot line that she wished nobody in an audience would see it, or she was worried about the uncertain auspices under which it was being produced. This was one of only two films actually made by the Technicolor company – usually they leased out their cameras, the special film they required and the services of a “color consultant” to a producing studio – and the second, The Viking (1928), got caught in the silent-to-sound transition and was released with a “wild” soundtrack of various sound effects and music, mostly by Wagner or Grieg. The Toll of the Sea was rediscovered in 1985 after being thought lost for years, and UCLA did a full restoration that involved taking one of the few remaining two-strip Technicolor cameras and shooting footage of the sea to fill in the last three minutes, which were missing from the extant negative. Alas, this was not the version we got last night: Alpha Video Entertainment just stuck on a crudely filmed ending consisting of black-and-white stills from the original production and a couple of tacky attempts to reproduce Marion’s intertitles. The good news is that even with a rather dubious provenance, The Toll of the Sea survived in pretty good shape; the colors are well preserved and have the sort of painterly elegance of two-strip at its best. I often enjoy watching a two-strip film in good condition more than the often overbright, shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it, even though three-strip’s big advantage over two-strip was you could photograph blue. Some extant two-strip films have scenes that look blue, but I suspect that’s due to differential fading of the dyes used to make the original prints, in which the yellow components of the green dyes faded more quickly and completely than the blue ones.

In The Toll of the Sea the sea itself looks green (with occasional bits of beige) and the sky looks teal, which along with turquoise was as close to blue as the process could get. The actors’ faces are variable; sometimes both white and Asian actors look “right” in their skin tones, though there are a few closeups of Anna May Wong in which she looks sunburned because the color is overbalanced towards red. That’s also a problem with some of the seascapes; beachside cliffs that were probably supposed to look like coral are almost neon-bright red. One of the major limitations of Technicolor was that the cameras and film required immense amounts of light, and I suspect that’s why Frances Marion wrote the film to take place entirely outdoors so the actors wouldn’t be exposed to the huge amounts of heat generated by the ultra-bright lights. (When three-strip came in the new process demanded even brighter – and hotter – lights than two-strip had; actors making films in early three-strip frequently wore sunglasses during rehearsals and took them off only when the cameras were actually rolling.) The Toll of the Sea holds up surprisingly well as a movie, apart from the interest of it being the first film made in a color process that didn’t require special projectors to be shown. Of course you have to accept the so-called “Orientalism” of the plot, the veiled racism of the whole idea that an Asian woman would be so besotted with a white man that she’d ignore all the warnings and kill herself when he turned up again with a white wife. But one good thing about The Toll of the Sea is the stunning acting; Anna May Wong in particular goes through her role with almost none of the hammy gesturing people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish think they were all acted like. Her closeups are poignant and luminous, and she gets her emotions across with a minimum of facial expressions. In fact, all the actors are restrained – I suspect that’s Chester Franklin’s doing – and The Toll of the Sea is one of those movies that makes you wonder why anyone thought that films needed sound.