Ramona

If you had not read the original novel or at least read up on the film "Ramona", I don't think you'd have much of a notion of what is transpiring. Though this is only a seventeen minute movie, the whole of a novel is presented to us. If it wasn't for its landmark status as representative of early silent films it wouldn't pass muster.

This is a tale of the inequitable treatment of Southern California Native Americans. Ramona is smitten by a member of the local tribe, and they eventually are wed despite the objections of her sort-of foster mother. The couple are run out of their home by land-grabbing white settlers. All this ends badly.

Consider that the novel "Ramona" was published in 1884 and that it achieved enormous popularity, so D. W. Griffith's film was destined to be a success. But besides its place in film history for the almost overwhelming interest of the story to the public it was one of the many pieces of work D. W. Griffith was churning out, making history just in the doing.

According to Darling Kindersley's "Chronicle of the Cinema", Griffith went on a "working vacation" – one in which he shot 25 films in four months as he and his ensemble toured California. One of the films made was this, "Ramona."

Paul Spehr drives home the importance of "Ramona" and other Griffith efforts around this time:

…it is camera work and editing that make the most startling advances during this period. Griffith "publicly laid claim to the introduction of 'large or close-up figures, distant views as represented first in 'Ramona', the 'switchback' (cross cutting – gc), sustained suspense, the 'fade out', and restraint in expression', raising motion picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.'

One quite noticeable aspect of this film is the lack of dialogue frames. Instead there are graphic text frames inserted occasionally to detail what is transpiring. But in no sense is the filmed footage tied to the actual dialogue we see. But as mentioned above without prior knowledge of the subject the movie is so abbreviated that it doesn't come close to conveying the whole story.

It has taken me far longer to write this review than to see the movie.

Three stars.

When Native American Allesandro first glimpses Ramona (Mary Pickford) he is completely smitten. After singing and strumming a tune on his guitar Ramona becomes romantically drawn to the benign Allesandro in spite of the the strong societal taboos facing such a relationship. They elope together but wherever they turn they are met with racist fury.

Before and after (Broken Blossoms) Birth of a Nation DW Griffith had no qualms about magnifying white man intolerance towards minorities. In Ramona he does a fine job of creating immense sympathy for the lovers and clear condemnation for the violent loutish behavior of the conquerers.

There are some stunning vistas to behold in this on location shoot in Ventura County CA. as the outcasts retreat to the perceived freedom of the great outdoors. Griffith's compositions are however mostly stilted and poorly blocked but it does not lessen the impact that Ramona is a brave socially conscious film that dares to hold up a mirror to the face of the majority of ticket buyers and take the other side.

Regrettably, this is not a good film by any standards. Aside from fine location photography, it's a complete mess. Of course, it's an epic tale of love and suffering, squeezed into less than 20 minutes, filmed probably in a couple of days. But even under these circumstances it should have been better. As the film proceeds, it becomes more and more ludicrous, with white men perpetually stepping into the frame, declaring "This is my land!". The acting is disastrous. Mary Pickford has only two expressions in her acting book; the tragic death of Alessandro (Henry B. Walthall) sadly comes across as one of the funniest in the silent films. Only veteran Francis J. Grandon gives a decent, less-than-rabid performance in one of his last films, before he turned into directing. All said, the film is presented on BluRay in good quality and has a soaring (contemporary) score, played by violin and piano. Wouldn't hurt one to watch it, but make sure this isn't your first encounter with Miss Pickford. She has done better.

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.

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.