I must admit that only recently I learned that the FIRST two-color Technicolor movie was neither "Doctor X" from 1932, as most people believe, nor Douglas Fairbanks' "Black Pirate" from 1926 - it was a most BEAUTIFUL and moving drama called "Toll of the Sea" from 1922! And it was believed lost for many years, but then restored most carefully by the UCLA - and now it shines in its BRIGHTEST colors again (maybe even brighter than they originally were...)! And that's not the only astonishing thing about this GREAT project (which certainly was a HUGE risk at the time for the producers, because to make a whole Technicolor feature film at the time must have meant VAST expenses, and nobody knew, of course, how the public would react) - maybe even MORE astonishing is the fact that the heroine of this bold venture was an Asian: Anna May Wong, in one of her sweetest and most beautiful appearances!
The story is quite sad, about a Chinese girl who falls in love with an American stranded on the rocks close to her house after a shipwreck; he marries her and promises her that he'll take her 'over to those United States', as she believes (although her friends know better: one of them tells her that she's been forsaken by FOUR American husbands already - a little sideswipe at the morals of American sailors...) - and she waits for him with the little son she's given birth to in the meantime to come back and take her; well, he DOES come back, but with another wife...
A MOST remarkable movie in SO many aspects - the colors, the Asian background, the (then still taboo) subject of interracial marriage - and yet, it seems to be almost forgotten today. It's HIGH time to find ways to get young people interested in old movies again!!
The story is quite sad, about a Chinese girl who falls in love with an American stranded on the rocks close to her house after a shipwreck; he marries her and promises her that he'll take her 'over to those United States', as she believes (although her friends know better: one of them tells her that she's been forsaken by FOUR American husbands already - a little sideswipe at the morals of American sailors...) - and she waits for him with the little son she's given birth to in the meantime to come back and take her; well, he DOES come back, but with another wife...
A MOST remarkable movie in SO many aspects - the colors, the Asian background, the (then still taboo) subject of interracial marriage - and yet, it seems to be almost forgotten today. It's HIGH time to find ways to get young people interested in old movies again!!