Chester M. Franklin's The Toll of the Sea, and two shorts

Includes the following films:

Red Hair [Technicolor fragment]

1928. USA. Directed by Clarence Badger. With Clara Bow. This recently rediscovered film fragment offers a tantalizing glimpse of Clara Bow in her only color appearance, sporting a shock of red hair. 35mm restoration courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive. 3 min.

[Mary Pickford Technicolor test for The Black Pirate]

1926. USA. 35mm print courtesy George Eastman House. 5 min.

The Toll of the Sea

1922. USA. Directed by Chester M. Franklin. Screenplay by Frances Marion. With Anna May Wong, Kenneth Harlan, Beatrice Bentley. A variation on Madame Butterfly, The Toll of the Sea holds an important place in film history. It features Anna May Wong in her first starring role (her pathos-rich performance enchanted audiences, including Variety’s critic, who praised her as “an exquisite crier without glycerin”). And as the second two-strip Technicolor feature ever made—as well as the first that could be played through a standard projector—it is the earliest film in this exhibition. (The Gulf Between, produced five years earlier by Technicolor, in 1917, seems only to survive as three single frames.) 35mm restoration courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive. 54 min.