Ramona

Around 1910 there was a trend of "Noble Red Man" films in American cinema, mostly Westerns, which addressed -- generally in a primitive way -- the social wrongs perpetrated against Native Americans by white interests in the Federal United States. D. W. Griffith had spurred on the genre -- ultimately superseded by the dramatic need to portray Native Americans as villains in motion pictures -- through making "The Red Man's View" somewhat earlier, and had appeared in a stage production of "Ramona" before he'd entered the movie business. "Ramona" was among the first narrative films to be shot in Southern California and one of the first American motion pictures made from a popular novel for which the rights was cleared through its publisher. Before, any literary matter was considered fair game for early movie companies, but Edgar Wallace's 1907 suit against Kalem for their unauthorized adaptation of "Ben Hur" had lately changed the rules; Griffith and Biograph paid $100 for the film rights to the book.

Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel had served as a pioneering effort in developing sympathy among mainstream Americans for the plight of the Native American, despite its trappings of tragic, nineteenth-century romance and melodrama. In boiling down the 26 chapters of Jackson's novel to the single reel Biograph film, Griffith and Stanner E. V. Taylor created an adaptation that still requires some familiarity with the source for the viewer to fully digest its action. In 1910, practically everyone in the overwhelmingly female film audience would have had contact with "Ramona," whereas a century or more later that is generally not the case. Likewise, the broad, gesture-based style of acting in this early silent film doesn't travel particularly well. Moreover, some may take objection to the anachronistic style of Maria Newman's music score for the 2009 Pickford Foundation restoration of "Ramona." Nevertheless, the Ventura County locations seen in the film remain stunning, and "Ramona" has survived in multiple excellent print sources, including a duplicate negative that Mary Pickford herself once owned. It is one of only a handful of Biograph films that has survived with all of its original titles intact, although these tend to anticipate the action rather than to support it. As a 1910 film, the visual language of "Ramona" is considerably advanced; it isn't at all stagy or static, and its locations contribute greatly to the dramatic flexibility of the tale told, even if the acting and condensation of the story seems somewhat limited. "Ramona" is a milestone in the history of early American films, and while it might not even be the best movie that D. W. Griffith made in 1910, it was one of the most popular in its own time and deserves recognition among his most significant Biographs.

This film was an adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson's 'Ramona'. Griffith gravitated towards this project because his previous film, 'The Two Brothers', came to a halt because of three days of rain. He felt like a caged lion being trapped inside his hotel room, and decided to get to work on his next project: this one.

Except for some nice visual touches in the B&W outdoor photography, this RAMONA from D.W. Griffith is easily dismissed as the primitive work that it obviously is.

Certainly MARY PICKFORD is nobody's idea of a Spanish girl but here she has a black wig and tries to look the role rather than the fair-haired image we usually have of her. Her acting style, as so often in these silents, is terribly over-the-top by today's standards and so are most of the others in the cast, particularly HENRY B. WALTHALL as her Indian lover.

The story is compressed into two reels, which is probably just as well considering the limitations imposed on it by silent screen techniques and title cards that attempt to tell too much in too little time.

It's all over before it begins. A time capsule of early attempts to create feature films.

The first movie to be adapted from a novel that paid an author a fee for rights to use the story was Biograph Studio's "Ramona," released in May 1910. Director D.W. Griffith insisted the studio pay Helen Hunt Jackson $100 to translate her best-selling book to film. The sentiment of Griffith paying an author for the rights may have been because of the pending appeal of the case against Karem Studios working itself through the courts to the Supreme Court. That was the 1907 "Ben Hur" litigation suit on the studio using the Ben Hur story without the author's heirs' permission. Griffith made sure his audience noticed the attribution to the author by stating her name and and the book's publisher in the opening credits--a first in cinema.

"Ramona" stars Mary Pickford as a Spanish orphan who falls in love with a Native American. Griffith uses solitary or small groups of people to symbolize the larger historical scope of the white man civilization's treatment of constantly evicting Native Americans from their lands. Here, the Indians are represented by a ranch worker who falls in love with Ramona, who returns his passion. Once the Spanish Californians realize the mixed race affair, they go about burning the Indian village where her lover resides, causing a dislocation of the natives from the area.

"Ramona" was filmed in Ventura County, CA, during Griffith's winter stay in that state's warmer climate. Taking advantage of its stunning typography, Griffith used the high, rugged mountains as a backdrop to capture the movie's eye-popping visuals as the drama unfolds before his camera.

Griffith had an affinity for RAMONA, having appeared in two stage versions of the novel and having hectored his bosses into paying a hundred dollars for screen rights -- this two-reeler was advertised as the most expensive picture ever made. It falls into the class of Griffith films in which he expresses sympathy for minorities and suggests that the best thing to do with people is to leave them alone. This statement may come as a bit of a shocker to those whose only knowledge of Griffith is knowing, second hand about the racism of BIRTH OF A NATION, but none to those who are familiar with more of his work: BROKEN BLOSSOMS also falls into this category and, to a great extent, so does BOAN.

Although this film is full of fine visual touches -- some excellent deep-focus shots of the characters with the distant mountains behind them dominate the camera-work --and has good performances by Mary Pickford in the title role and a slightly over-the-top performance by Henry Walthall, there is far too much solitary posing and the two reels are too brief for the story. Still, Pickford and Walthall are excellent in their scenes together, Griffith has some lovely landscape to work with and his stock company is up to their usual level of competence.