The Toll of the Sea

On the Chinese coast a young woman rescues an American man who has washed up from the sea. The two become attached and are together. But the man wants to go back to his own country, and he no longer intends to take her with him. She waits for him; a child is born in the meantime. When the man comes back years later, there is someone else with him. Adapted from Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the film was the first Hollywood picture shot in two-colour Technicolor and the first colour feature that did not require a special projector. Anna May Wong, seventeen at the time, played her first leading role in it. The last two reels of the negative were missing; the film was preserved by the UCLA archive in 1985 and the missing ending was reconstructed. The colours are still surprisingly vivid today.