One such film is Ramona: A Story of the White Man's Injustice to the Indian (1910), made during his fruitful tenure at American Biograph. Based on the popular novel by Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona tells the story of a woman of mixed descent (Mary Pickford), who is wooed by a prosperous Spaniard: Felipe (Francis J. Grandon). She is instead attracted to Alessandro (Henry B. Walthall), a Native American peon. In spite of her mother's disapproval, Ramona elopes with Alessandro and gives up a life of material comfort for a shack salvaged from the ruins of Alessandro's Indian village (recently destroyed by whites). With their infant child, they are persecuted and displaced by those who govern the California wilderness ("These lands belong to us!" say the white men). When their child dies, Ramona and Alessandro give it an impoverished, intimate funeral (a remarkably potent scene that foreshadows the baptism of the dead child in Griffith's Way Down East [1920]).
Ramona and Alessandro's predicament worsens when, in an altercation with a white man who is again driving them from the land, Alessandro is shot in the face. Felipe, meanwhile, has taken it upon himself to aid Ramona and Alessandro. He ventures into the wilderness in search of his former love, only to find her in the midst of yet another improvised funeral.
Ramona was not Griffith's first sympathetic depiction of Native Americans. He had made a number of Indian-themed films in upstate New York, the most significant being the empathetic 1909 picture The Red Man's View. At other times, however, Griffith would abandon his high-minded principles and revert to stereotypical depictions in order to fuel the drama of his films -- as with The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), in which a group of white settlers are besieged by drunken Native American marauders.
What is significant about Ramona is that it doesn't merely divide the population into the suffering Native Americans and the cruel whites. It depicts the Spanish Californians as occupying a position between the two extremes. They are prosperous, proud, but their minds are not clouded by the prejudices that torment the whites. Felipe is willing to have Ramona for his wife, and stand by her after she has rejected him, even though it is discovered she is of mixed descent (presumably Spanish and Indian).
On some levels, Griffith's "tolerance" films may seem to oversimplify complex race relations. But one must remember that, in 1910, cinematic storytelling was still in its childhood. Within the appropriate historical context, Griffith's films (Ramona, especially) should be considered quite progressive, and quite effective. The New York Dramatic Mirror called The Red Man's View, "symbolical of the fate of the helpless Indian race as it has been forced to recede before the advancing white, and as such it is full of poetic sentiment and artistic beauty."
Prior to being made as a film, the novel Ramona was adapted to the stage, and -- during his early career as an actor -- Griffith had performed in a West Coast touring production (in 1905, playing Alessandro). After the Griffith film, Ramona was remade a number of times, with versions directed by Donald Crisp (1916, starring Adda Gleason), Edwin Carewe (1928, starring Dolores del Rio), and Henry King (1936, starring Loretta Young).
Helen Hunt Jackson was not simply a novelist who used the plight of the Southern Californian Indian as an exploitable topic for popular literature. She was an activist who lobbied congress to improve the treatment of Native Americans. The tragedy of Ramona was a true story, which Jackson had read about in a newspaper. It inspired her to explore the Santa Clara River Valley, where she learned of the conditions of reservations and Indian schools. Her petitions to Congress -- calling for increased government support -- were unsuccessful, so she decided to fictionalize Ramona's experiences. Comparing her work to Harriet Beecher Stowe's revolutionary Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jackson said, "If I can do one-hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful."
Griffith could have written his own drama on the plight of the Native American, but he wanted to be sure Jackson's name was attached to the project, because of the renown she had earned with her novel. To this end, he convinced Biograph to pay her $100 for the screen rights to Ramona. According to Griffith biographer Richard Schickel, "it is possible that this was the first such sale in movie history."
In pursuit of authenticity, Griffith shot the film on location in Camulos (Ventura County), California, where the story was set.
In 1910, most of the film industry was still based in the New York/New Jersey area. Griffith was among the first high-profile filmmakers to explore the favorable climate and awesome scenery of the American West. He embarked on his California excursion with a group of about thirty cast and crew members, with the intention of shooting several projects during the winter months of 1910. Ramona was the second-to-last film Griffith shot on the trip west, but it was, according to Schickel, "the climax."
Although filmmakers had ventured into California in the past, and shot portions of their films there, Griffith earned the distinction of making the first studio picture shot entirely in Hollywood: In Old California (1910, the second film made on the trip).
A remarkable aspect of the films Griffith made at Biograph in the early 1910s is that they can pack an entire novel into a single reel (Ramona runs a mere 17 minutes). Equally impressive as the strides he was making in the aesthetic use of the camera is the fact that his films still maintain a dramatic resonance nearly a century after they were made. Other films of the era may possess stirring action and visual inventiveness, but extremely rare are those that can exert such a genuine emotional pull upon the 21st-century viewer.
In terms of film preservation, Ramona is a special film because it is one of the few Biograph titles of that period that survives with the original title cards. Probably for cost-saving reasons, Biograph removed the text when they were archiving the original negatives and paper prints. Most of the surviving Biograph films exist in this incomplete form.
Speaking of title cards, it should be noted that the narrative of Ramona unfolds in a style that may seem illogical to modern viewers. As was the norm in 1910, intertitles appear before each scene and basically spell out what is about to happen. This was common studio practice in an era when most filmmakers had not yet mastered the skills of purely visual storytelling, and viewers often needed a little help deciphering the stories. Griffith did have the gift of visual storytelling. As a result, these "spoiler" titles feel superfluous, and only slow down the progress of the story. For this reason, the Griffith Biograph shorts that survive without titles are only marginally compromised by the absence of text -- while the title-less films of other directors are quite often incomprehensible.
Director: D.W. Griffith
Screenplay: D.W. Griffith and Stanner E.V. Taylor, Based on the novel by Helen Jackson
Cinematography: G.W. Bitzer
Music: Maria Newman (2009)
Cast: Mary Pickford (Ramona), Henry B. Walthall (Alessandro), Francis J. Grandon (Felipe), Kate Bruce (The Mother).
BW-17m.
by Bret Wood
