The Toll of the Sea / Bold Journey: “Native Land” - Harvard Film Archive

Sunday | October 8, 2006 7:00 pm

The Toll of the Sea

Directed by Chester M. Franklin

Bold Journey: “Native Land”

1957, digital video, color, 30 min

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film

The Toll of the Sea

Directed by Chester M. Franklin.
With Anna May Wong, Kenneth Harlan, Beatrice Bentley.
US, 1922, 35mm, black & white, silent, 45 min.
Print source: UCLA

The first color feature film was also seventeen-year-old Wong’s first leading role. In this popular melodrama based on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Variety singled out “the extraordinarily fine playing of Anna May Wong, who is an exquisite crier without glycerin.”

Restored 35mm print from UCLA Film and TV Archive.

Bold Journey: “Native Land”

1957, digital video, color, 30 min.
Copy source: Private collector

Wong narrates this television documentary about her 1936 trip to China. Rare archival footage.

September 26 – November 15, 2006

Centennial Starlets: Anna May Wong and Janet Gaynor

September 6–November 7

Psychedelic Cinema

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

November 8

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

November 9–December 9

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

November 10–24

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

November 11

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

November 23

Wings of a Serf

a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

November 25

Le Dépays + Sans soleil

Peter Sellers wearing a large hat with "ME" embroidered on it, and gripping a Pilgrim-like collar

December 12

Carol for Another Christmas