Ramona (1910)

D.W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) starred Mary Pickford as the half-white, half-Indian title character in a highly condensed adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Indian-reform novel Ramona. The sentimental novel, in 1910, was still well known in Southern California and (as cited in film reviews) remained well remembered throughout the rest of the nation. Griffith’s film was an important part of a long cultural process that transformed the sentimental novel into commercialized mythology in the form of tourist promotion and regional development strategy. By combining the book’s popularity with the romantic visual decorations of 1890s parades and festivals such as La Fiesta de Los Angeles and La Fiesta de Las Flores (which were also modeled on the novel), Griffith was able to present his film as a reclamation of the novel’s original reform intent while, simultaneously, introducing the work to a new audience composed largely of middle-class businessmen. Filmed on location in the “real” settings of the novel—such as the verdant mountains above the Camulos estate in Ventura County—and introduced with a title card crediting Helen Hunt Jackson, the film was subtitled “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.” Louis Reeves Harrison, reviewing the film for Moving Picture World in 1910, commented that Griffith and the Biograph Company had harmoniously blended narrative and location, signifying an advanced “step in the evolution of a new art and blazed the way forward for additional, greater achievement.” The review also described a filled-to-capacity theater of “earnest-looking” businessmen for the film’s premiere—an audience that contrasts heavily with Jackson’s largely female readership at the time of the novel’s publication. It was an audience, Harrison wrote, that viewed Griffith and the Biograph Company to be reflections of themselves: models of business-minded progressivism. The film’s producers were “strongly entrenched in public confidence” and “known to be earnest, striving to attain the best results, never pandering to the baser elements of society nor catering to perverted instincts.” Harrison enlarged upon this relationship between the business-minded audience and Griffith’s revision of the original text, writing “it seemed as though the playwright or director, or possibly both, had consciously emphasized a bigger and broader and finer theme . . . Natural Selection!” This association between Griffith’s Ramona and Social Darwinism was implicit in the visual language of the film itself, which was undoubtedly based on theatrical versions of the novel as well. Griffith, who had starred as the character Alessandro in a traveling production of Ramona that toured California from February 28—April 23, 1905, was intimately familiar with the original novel and adapted theater versions. The visual depiction of the Indian Alessandro and Mexican Felipe as meek, helpless, and feminine reconfigured the plot of the reform novel into a sexual melodrama centered the eroticized body of Mary Pickford. The contrast of Pickford’s languishing body and Felipe’s un-masculine response functioned as a dual message to the progressive businessmen of the audience, at once appealing to their libido and serving as valuable history lesson. In Griffith’s reworking of the text, Felipe has become and allegory for the Mexican state prior to the Mexican-American War. By representing the inability of the Mexico state to protect its women and defend its territory against invasion—from either the Anglo settlers depicted in the novel or the United States military during the Mexican-American War—Felipe’s feminine weakness suggested the intertwined notions that the physical protection of lily-white Mary Pickford (even when portraying the half-Indian Ramona) was better suited for the modern businessman in the audience than for the onscreen Mexican, and that American imperialism was justified.