The Toll Of The Sea

Sleepless In Sea Toll

The Toll Of The Sea
USA 1922
Directed by Chester M Franklin
Screened at NFT2 on Sunday 7th September 2025

“NOTE: The last sequence of THE TOLL OF THE SEA has not survived. In order to complete the film, new footage of the Pacific Ocean was shot in October 1985 with an authentic two-colour Technicolor camera. Titles for the closing sequence have been recreated from Frances Marion's original scenario.”

The Toll Of The Sea was considered lost for a long time before most of the original negative was rediscovered in the 1960s. Which would explain why the two strip technicolour presentation with live piano accompaniment, which I saw as part of the BFIs Anna May Wong - The Art Of Reinvention season at the NFT, included the disclaimer above. 

The film was introduced by Anna Wong, Anna May Wong’s niece (yeah, I’m not sure how that works since the great star was born in 1905), who gave the audience a quick crash course and said this was considered her breakout movie (although they were also showing Song that same afternoon and, if the tube strike hadn’t been looming within the next couple of hours, I would probably have tried to snag a ticket for that too). And, I guess that’s probably right... because Miss Wong was spotted by Douglas Fairbanks Jr when he was watching this movie at the cinema and he decided to cast her in a role in his lavish production of The Thief Of Bagdad (yeah, that’s how that version of the movie spells it folks... don’t moan at me, please). 

Miss Wong, the niece, also mentioned two American pieces of ephemera of the last couple of decades as proof that her legend and importance as an Asian actress (even though she was born in Los Angeles and never actually went to China for a few decades, wrongfooting the press in her early career with her ‘American as apple pie’ persona) has lived on (which it certainly has)... in the form of Mattel’s special Anna May Wong Barbie (which I coincidentally had on order from eBay from a few nights before) and the American quarters bearing her likeness (which... ditto!). 

And then they screened the film, which was a Chinese based spin on Madama Butterfly (this was also at least the third motion picture to be called The Toll Of The Sea but the other two didn’t make use of the same source material). Here, Anna May Wong plays Lotus Flower, who falls in love with American Allen Carver, played by Kenneth Harlan, who reminded me a lot of a young Colin Clive, truth be told. 

Now, the two strip technicolour on the 35mm print they were showing this on looked pretty good to me and not quite as rough around the edges as I remembered from other films using the process restored on DVD and Blu Ray. So that was fine. What surprised me a little is, even though the film runs for barely longer than 50 minutes, there really are not that many locations and, despite being in the days of pre-sound, the camera wasn’t moving a heck of a lot either. But it was good enough and had other things going for it.

Primarily the tragic figure of Lotus Blossom, who is played absolutely beautifully by Anna May Wong here. Now, it would be easy (and so true) to say she steals the show from everybody else in this film. I mean, she is the only person you are looking at when you have the choice... but it would also be true to say that she carries a lot of the movie almost solo because, I think on only two, maybe three occasions, does the camera ever leave her to switch to a scenario where she is not present. And even then, in at least one of those, the edit is continually cross cutting between what’s going on in one place and Anna May Wong performing solo, with her character waiting to find out what is going on in another. 

So, yeah, after witnessing her brilliance in both Piccadilly (reviewed here https://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2010/03/piccadilly.html in only my second post on this blog) and Shanghai Express (review coming soon, probably next year, it's written but I want to finish a box off before publishing the reviews) I finally got to see a film, however brief, where this leading lady dominated the picture and, she certainly does that with her emotive spates of intense misery interpolated with the innocent naivete of her character. If some wily company would get it into their head to put this thing out on Blu Ray (preferably as part of an Anna May Wong box set), then I’ll definitely be lining up for that one (I'm looking in your direction, Eureka Masters Of Cinema and the BFI labels). 

So I think that’s me pretty much done on The Toll Of The Sea but, its not a presentation I shall forget in a hurry. I’ll be seeing a few more of this lady’s films at the NFT later in the month and so I will report back here when that’s done.