9MADAME BUTTERFLY IN TECHNICOLOR

Film poster for The Toll of the Sea, 1922 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

IN THE LONG HISTORY of America’s Oriental imagination, few tropes have commanded more potency than the character of Madame Butterfly. Originally published in 1898 as a short story written by John Luther Long, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, the tale of “Madame Butterfly” was inspired by the French writer Pierre Loti’s novel, Madame Chrysanthème (1887). In 1900, David Belasco adapted Long’s story into a one-act play. After a successful run in New York, the play traveled to London, where the already legendary Italian composer Giacomo Puccini attended a performance. Puccini was hooked. Less than three years later, his opera Madama Butterfly premiered at Milan’s La Scala in 1904 and opened in New York in 1906. Throughout the twentieth century, the doomed love story of a US Navy officer and an exploited Japanese geisha would undergo various incarnations and spawn countless imitations, but Puccini proved prescient in depicting the personal impact of American imperialism a half-century before “the Ugly American” even became a phrase.

In the immediate wake of Puccini’s opera, Paramount released the film Madame Butterfly in 1915, starring Mary Pickford, who had been a child actor working for David Belasco’s theater company. It was followed by a Metro film, The Toll of the Sea (1922), featuring the star of our story, Anna May Wong. In midcentury, James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), was turned into a Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which included an episode of romance between a US Marine Corps lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman. Portraying Lieutenant Joseph Cable’s fears over the social consequences of interracial marriage, the 1949 musical South Pacific featured show tunes like “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”:

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made …

It is worth noting that a number like this from the popular “Bali-ha’i” segment of the show was considered too controversial or simply inappropriate for the musical stage at the time. Perturbed by the interracial theme, lawmakers in Georgia passed a bill banning entertainment like South Pacific, with one legislator intoning that “a song justifying interracial marriage is implicitly a threat to the American way of life.”¹

Unfazed by the backlash, Michener continued to explore the theme in his next novel, Sayonara (1954), in which an American fighter pilot fell in love with a Japanese dancer during the Korean War. The book was adapted to an eponymous film in 1957, starring Marlon Brando and Miyoshi Umeki, and the film won four Academy Awards. The same year saw the publication of Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong, a novel about a British man romancing a Chinese prostitute in Hong Kong. The bestselling book was subsequently adapted for the stage and the screen, with phenomenal success. And, in the twilight years of the twentieth century, David Henry Hwang’s award-winning play, M. Butterfly (1988), stood the familiar tale on its head, producing a faux spy-thriller about a French diplomat and his longtime Chinese lover, who turns out to be a secret agent and a man, not to mention Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical Miss Saigon (1989), which changed the setting to Vietnam with a similar narrative.

In its infinite variations—perhaps with the exception of Hwang’s ingenious retooling—the storyline of Madame Butterfly remains the same: A white man woos an Asian woman and then abandons her to a tragic fate. Pairing Navy officers, Air Force pilots, and US Marines—all heterosexual, hypermasculine symbols—with Asian geishas, dancers, and sex workers, the story creates a stark contrast between dominating white masculinity and submissive Asian femininity, with war and colonialism as a cinematic obbligato. The many lives of Madame Butterfly track, almost step by step, the global footprints of the American empire—from Commodore Matthew Perry’s naval fleet opening the bolted door of Tokugawa Japan to the later wars in China, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond. As in the original story, the narrative affords a white man an extended “quickie” in an exotic, faraway locale before he finds or returns to a “real wife” at home, while the Asian woman suffers the consequences of abandonment and childbearing, invariably ending in suicide. It has all the ingredients of an appetizing potpourri ready for consumption by kitsch-thirsty America: romance, war, sex, gunboats, fighter jets, cherry blossoms, geishas, kabuki, lotus flowers, hara-kiri, and more. Like those slumming trips to Chinatown, the Madame Butterfly saga provides Americans with a package tour through the cherry-tree lane of Oriental exotica and erotica.

It is almost serendipitous, then, that Anna May Wong, a rising star who came to symbolize the forbidden East, would assume the prototypical Madame Butterfly persona the first time she secured a lead role—as Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea. Directed by Chester M. Franklin, the 1922 film was, as the noted screenwriter Frances Marion admitted, “practically the stepdaughter of Madame Butterfly.”² The story takes place in Hong Kong, where Lotus Flower finds a Caucasian man washed up on the beach. After the rescue, she nurses Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlan) back to health and in the process falls in love. He entices her with the prospect of going to America with him, even as local gossips warn her that white men will only marry her “Chinese fashion” and then forget her when they leave. As one of them puts it, somewhat sarcastically, “It is true! I have already been forgotten by four faithful American husbands.” But Lotus Flower refuses to listen. One day, Carver receives a cable urging him to return to America immediately. After his abrupt departure, Lotus Flower gives birth to a son. Despite the passing of many moons, she still pines for his return. To quiet the local gossips, she even forges a letter to herself, pretending it’s from her “honorable husband.” When he finally comes back, he brings his “real” wife, a Caucasian woman. Brokenhearted, Lotus Flower asks the white woman to take the boy and raise him as her own. And then, à la Madame Butterfly, Lotus Flower throws herself into the sea.

Because she played a tragic part, Anna May had to sob often in the film, as she would do in many more pictures to come. “I cried so that I could not stop crying,” as she recalled the ordeal during the production. “Finally the cynical assistant director called out, ‘Somebody throw Anna May Wong a raft.’ ”³ The film also required her to “speak” pidgin English, with lines such as “Christian lady at mission tell me America fine place. Women free—can spend all husband’s money,” and “If you no come back to me, you make my heart go dead.” Since it was a silent film, she did not actually say these lines, but she had to mime them in a manner befitting the words on the titles. Basically a soprano with no voice, Anna May played these scenes with perfection, in the process garnering glowing reviews. Variety noted her “extraordinary fine playing,” calling her “an exquisite crier without glycerin.” Film Daily raved, “The theme is really a very sympathetic one made doubly interesting and sincere by the splendid work of Anna May Wong. She is a clever little actress and displays fine emotional ability.” The New York Times also gave her a big thumbs-up: “Miss Wong stirs in the spectator all the sympathy her part calls for and she never repels one by an excess of theatrical ‘feeling.’ She has a difficult role, a role that is botched nine times out of ten, but hers is the tenth performance. Completely unconscious of the camera, with a fine sense of proportion and remarkable pantomimic accuracy, she makes the deserted little Lotus Flower a genuinely appealing, understandable figure.”⁴

Unlike Bits of Life, which failed miserably at the box office, The Toll of the Sea grossed more than $250,000. To make the occasion even more momentous, it was the first film successfully made in Technicolor. Although The Gulf Between, a short feature shot in 1917, was actually the first color film, it was largely deemed a failure, abandoned after just one embarrassing screening in Buffalo. In the interim years, scientists and engineers worked to improve the technology so that it could become a practical option for commercial film production. The result was Technicolor No. II, which contained a new subtractive camera and a printing method that could print two color records onto one single filmstrip, requiring no special projector for screening. Bankrolled by Herbert Kalmus of the Technicolor company, The Toll of the Sea was therefore a joint venture between Oriental imagination and new technology.

Notably, while applauding Anna May’s acting, the reviewers also spilled much ink on the new chromatic medium, especially the relation of color to racial and cultural differences. The New York Times opined: “Here are settings just waiting for reproduction in colors, and in them are Chinese people whose costumes of elaborate and finely embroidered silks and severely plain cotton permit richness and the effective variety of contrasts.” The reviewer for Variety, however, seemed displeased with the effect of the newfangled machine: “Nothing in a moving picture can rise superior to the story. Coloring never will, never has, and doesn’t here. The coloring runs without streaks, the camera catching the natural colors apparently, although what seemed something of a freak in this process is that the pallid color given to the complexion of the Chinese people extended to the faces of Americans as well.” Apparently, this reviewer was disturbed by Technicolor’s inability to differentiate the skin color of Chinese actors from that of Caucasians, calling the tint spillover “a noticeable defect” and “a freak.”⁵

Many historians of color cinematography have argued that color in American films was often used to represent racial differences. From the very beginning, Hollywood was concerned with the inability of black-and-white films to showcase, pardon the oxymoron, the beauty of white. “All pretty girls in black and white are pale and consumptive,” an author proclaimed in an industry journal in 1927—even the gorgeous white goddess Clara Bow would lose the allure of her famous auburn locks in front of the black-and-white camera.⁶ In the years of exploration and prior to the adoption of color cinematography as the industry standard, the subjects chosen to experiment, demonstrate, and market color-film technologies were mostly people of color. As film scholar Kirsty Sinclair Dootson remarks, “Even the briefest survey of landmark films made by American market-leader Technicolor evidences that although whiteness was the structuring principle of color cinema, people of color were routinely exploited as part of the system’s chromatic appeals.” The examples given by Dootson include the Mexican musical short La Cucaracha (1934), which launched Technicolor’s three-strip process; the blockbuster Gone with the Wind (1939), which secured the firm’s market dominance; and the 1922 Orientalist fantasy that debuted the two-color system, The Toll of the Sea.⁷

It makes sense, then, that the director would buck the tradition of yellowface and cast Anna May as the lead in The Toll of the Sea, an otherwise daring, unprecedented arrangement for a Hollywood film in 1922. In addition, two supporting roles were also played by actresses of Chinese descent, Etta Lee and Ming Young. In fact, Frances Marion had written the script with Anna May in mind—not just because the veteran screenwriter had been impressed by Anna May’s appearances in earlier films, but also because there was a need to test Technicolor No. II with real Chinese actors.

Interestingly, as the Variety reviewer lamented, the two-color scheme failed to accentuate the differences in skin tones between Chinese and white actors—a technical difficulty to be overcome later with the advent of the tricolor method. But The Toll of the Sea successfully exploited the so-called color consciousness of Hollywood by other means. As some scholars have pointed out, the film deliberately contrasts the riot of colors in China with the near-monochromatic palette of the Caucasian world. Besides the display of gay gardens and elaborately embroidered costumes for the Chinese characters, Lotus Flower often appears against a background of flowers and foliage, her dresses and ornaments blending in with the colors of her environment. In contrast, most of the Caucasian characters wear beige or gray suits, making them stand out against the verdant background, as free agents coming and going. Thus, the chromatic harmony between the Chinese heroine and her environment effectively marks her as racially different from the Caucasian characters.⁸

Comments made by a reviewer for Motion Picture News prove how successfully the film exploited the interplay between the new technology and Orientalist fantasy: “What land is richer in colors than China? Here we have a Chinese background for a story of an ancient legend. Here are the flowers, the sea, the soft skies in a harmonious arrangement of exquisite shades. Here is the land of the love boat and romance.”⁹ Although the film was made in California, with the lush landscape of Santa Monica palmed off as faraway China, reviewers raved about the “uncanny excellency” of the colorful reproduction of “actual persons and places,” as if “a little bit of life [was] lifted out of the Orient, framed and sent here to delight the eye and sadden the heart.”¹⁰

Just as the blockbuster The Birth of a Nation had used cinematic technology to exploit racial differences, The Toll of the Sea helped stoke America’s Oriental imagination via the new chromatic medium. Presenting a Madame Butterfly–type character for the first time in Technicolor also marked a milestone for Anna May, her first lead role in a feature film. She was even applauded by the New York Times, which urged, “She should be seen again and often on the screen.”¹¹