The Toll of the Sea

A landmark film on multiple fronts: the first feature shot entirely in two-color Technicolor, and the first Hollywood film to star an Asian American actress in the lead. Anna May Wong, just seventeen, plays Lotus Flower, a young Chinese woman who rescues an American sailor washed up on the shore and falls in love with him — with devastating consequences. The story is a reworking of Madame Butterfly, and its tragic trajectory is both deeply moving and painfully illustrative of the limited roles Hollywood offered Asian actresses: Wong would spend her entire career fighting the system that discovered her here. But her performance is extraordinary — natural, emotionally transparent, and heartbreaking — and the Technicolor photography gives the film an ethereal, hand-tinted beauty unlike anything else from the period.