Ramona (1928)

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.