The Toll of the Sea (1923)

I wanted to but couldn't!

A different way of telling a story

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

I just finished watching "The Toll of the Sea" for the first time. What a beautiful and moving film! Anna May Wong was perfect in her "Butterfly "role as Lotus Flower. She was so beautiful and had such wonderful expressiveness in her face, eyes, movements, gestures. It was a performance that mesmerised me, that touched me profoundly. And she was only a teenager when she made that film! In the end, the other characters are really only supporting props for her portrayal of a deeply wounded and utterly sacrificial love for a shallow husband and sweet child. The supporting actors do their jobs effectively but it is Lotus Blossom we care for most. To think that this gem was thought lost! This is the first time I've seen an entire silent film using The two-strip Technicolor technique. I've only seen clips from "The Black Pirate", the sequences in "Ben Hur" and the Exodus episode from "The Ten Commandments". I found its use in "The Toll of the Sea" very effective, particularly in conveying an ambiance of the exotic in the film and adding lustre and richness to the settings. I haven't thought too much about the personal emotional impact it may have on the viewer. When I watch the film again I'll try to analyse this factor.The piano score has a very nice delicacy which underlines the feelings and reactions of the various characters. I thought it quite sensitive and telling.An utterly beautiful film!

This film is, of course, memorable for its historic place as the first widely released film to be produced in color, albeit using a two-tone process that detected only red and green. It's indeed a visually beautiful film, with costumes and settings deliberately chosen to show off the pleasant colors that the new process could represent. Unfortunately I felt that the film itself just wasn't very good. In fact, it's probably best as a definition of "overwrought." Good melodrama has to keep the audiences illusions about the importance of what is going on intact; "The Toll of the Sea" frequently becomes laughable.The film is far too preoccupied with its own title cards: they are grandiloquent frequent, and frequently absurd or condescending. What is worse, major plot points, instead of being actually, filmed, are usually transmitted via title card. That's how we're let in on trivial details such as Elsie convincing Allan to say goodbye to Lotus Flower or Lotus Flower's son being born. That leaves the scenes that are actually filmed to consist mainly of characters (usually Lotus Flower) standing and emoting for long periods. I'm sure Anna May Wong is a good actress, but she's not given much of a chance to act here rather than to look sad for long periods. It's not good drama. I'm afraid the only thing to recommend this is, literally, the pretty colors.

Toll of the Sea, The (1922) * 1/2 (out of 4) Historically important but zero entertainment. A Chinese legend says that the ocean can give you great things but for every great thing you receive you will have to pay back double in loneliness. A Chinese woman is thrilled when an American man washes up on shore but after some brief dating he starts to have second thoughts about all that he has promised her. I'll get to the historic stuff later but the film here is deadly dull. This is one of a few examples where it seems there are more title cards than actual screen time. There's no direction throughout as the camera just sits there and the actors hardly move on screen. The title cards tell us what's going on, which is to be expected but they also try to tell us what emotions the actors should be showing us. I believe this was all done because everyone was more worried about the 2-strip Technicolor, which was being used for this film. There had been earlier examples of this technique but this film was the first where every scene was in color. There are some beautiful shots here and the director does try to use colorful locations to brighten things up. In the end, history buffs might want to take a look but other stay clear.

This beautifully told story was written by Frances Marion, the highest paid and most famous woman screenwriter of the early film days. It is beautifully photographed in color, one of the first. The story loosely follows Madame Butterfly and is tender and touching.