Ramona: A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian (1910)
Production Company: Biograph Co. Director: D.W. Griffith. Writer: Unknown; adapted from the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Photographer: G.W. Bitzer. Cast: Mary Pickford (Ramona), Henry B. Walthall (Alessandro), Kate Bruce (Ramona’s stepmother), Francis J. Grandon (Felipe, her stepbrother), Mack Sennett (first white persecutor). Transfer Note: Copied at 16 frames per second from 35mm positive preprint preserved by the Library of Congress (AFI/Mary Pickford Collection). New Music: Charles Shadle, score; Sarah Brady, flute; Krista Reisner, violin, David Russell, cello; Jean Rife, harpsichord. Running Time: 16 minutes.

Featured in Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934.

Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona suggests the challenges in trying to motivate reform through fiction. Set primarily in the California territory of the late 1840s (after the Mexican War but before statehood), her novel centers on the oppressed love of Alessandro, a mission Indian, and Ramona, from an aristocratic Mexican family. Jackson’s stance is carried into the subtitle of this 1910 adaptation: “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.”

Treatment of Native Americans in nineteenth-century California was arguably nearer to genocide than was any other period in U.S. history. Jackson had turned to the novel form after frustrations in trying to redress the past wrongs through reasoned activism. Back in 1881 she had sent copies of her documentary history of broken treaties, A Century of Dishonor, to every member of Congress and the next year been appointed a commissioner of Indian Affairs to help locate suitable new reservation lands in California. Her report, however, was filed away and forgotten.

“Now I have sugared my pill,” she said of Ramona, in which her policy argument was put in a form intended to “move people’s hearts.” The book was an immediate success. Unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman,” wrote the prestigious North American Review. The novel quickly sold its 15,000-copy first edition and has not been out of print since. What was gained in emotional appeal came at the price of allowing readers to overlook the policy issue. The story lived on in 50 stage variants before 1914, in an outdoor pageant still staged every spring, and in sentimental songs (“Ramona, I hear the mission bells above. / Ramona, they’re ringing out our song of love”).

“Hollywood” is near its start with this film. As implied by the unusual intertitle crediting Jackson’s publishers, this was among the first authorized book adaptations, costing the Biograph Company $100 for the rights and helping to make the film the “most expensive picture put out by any manufacturer up to that time,” according to company actress Linda Arvidson. Biograph’s single production unit, based in New York City, was at the end of its first winter in Los Angeles when it made the location trip 50 miles northwest to isolated Camulos for the four-day shoot, from March 30 through April 2, 1910. The company’s publicity trumpeted the “absolute authenticity” of filming in “the identical locations and buildings wherein Mrs. Jackson placed her characters.”

Biograph’s blurb reinforces a curious shift in the understanding of Jackson’s novel. Soon after publication, it came to be regarded as essentially a true story. Readers—and promoters of western tourism—started seeking its “real” locations, based on homes Jackson had used as settings. Books such as The Real Ramona (1900) and Through Ramona’s Country (1908) provided guides, and most editions of the novel by this time came with photographs of Rancho Camulos—which this film uses as the hacienda setting at the opening. We see Ramona and Alessandro on the porch of the rancho’s 1867 chapel, and their next meeting is staged just off the south veranda of the 1853 adobe. The film was made as nostalgia for colonial Spanish California was rising to a height, as evidenced also in the hundreds of commemorative bells installed after 1906 along El Camino Real, the road that linked the missions. Mary Pickford, a week shy of her 18th birthday, plays Ramona, 19 at the start of the novel. Pickford had been in the movies less than a year, although this was already her 60th film. Hollywood would make three more versions of Jackson’s novel, in 1916, 1928, and 1936.

The director of this first adaptation, D.W. Griffith, had appeared as Alessandro in a 1905 stage version of Ramona. Griffith, now inextricably linked with the racism of The Birth of a Nation (1915), had filmed earlier westerns (shot on the East Coast) in which villainous white men destroyed forest idylls of Native Americans. Reviews of his version of Ramona went out of their way, however, to deny that any social claim lingered from the source. “It is too late now for the reproduction of the novel to exert any influence in the rectification of a great wrong,” argued Moving Picture World, and critic Louis Reeves Harrison reported on his experience at a June 1910 screening: “The idea of the white man’s injustice to the Indian did not reach out into the sympathies of the audience at all.” Highly praised, though, was the innovative staging of the slaughter of the Indians. “Attention should be called,” wrote the New York Dramatic Mirror, “to a few remarkable scenes—one of them the destruction of Alessandro’s village, which we see with the poor Indian from a mountaintop looking down into a valley a mile or more away. The burning huts, the hurrying people and the wagons of the whites are clearly visible, though they appear but as mere specks in the distance.” (Thanks to this excellent print, saved by Mary Pickford herself and preserved by the Library of Congress, this all remains visible.)

Story details are evident only to those with memory of the novel, and many intertitles suggest illustrations of famous moments (such as “THE MEETING IN THE CHAPEL” and “THE INTUITION”). The first shot opens—as is apparent only from the novel—with Ramona mending a torn altar cloth as a band of Indians arrives for sheepshearing. Ramona’s discovery “THAT SHE HERSELF HAS INDIAN BLOOD” is also surprising without the novel’s back story of her adoption, and the sympathetic understanding from her other suitor, Felipe, seems unmotivated without the explanation that he has grown up as her stepbrother.

Hinted by the film’s final shot is the end of the novel, in which Ramona and Felipe marry. (Arvidson remembered this scene being filmed, but if so it must have been eliminated to fit the standard one-reel length, which the film already strains against.) In Jackson’s conclusion, Ramona and Felipe give up on California, with its “fast incoming Americans” planning “schemes of settlement and development.” The couple find peace in Mexico, where their story also continues to live on through adaptations, including a multi-episode telenovela that aired in 2000.—Scott Simmon

About the Music
I approached the task of composing a score for D.W. Griffith’s historically important 1910 version of Ramona with some trepidation. Being of Native American descent myself, I wanted to pay due respect to a work that helped to bring the plight of our Native peoples to public attention. I believed it important to treat the film as a serious work of art, and so wanted to compose a score that provided more than mere background illustration; partly for that reason I chose to avoid the numerous, if often amusing, clichés of ‘Indian’ music. There was also the challenge of narrative compression: The film abbreviates Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel in drastic ways, so it seemed important to compose a score that would impart a feeling of continuity throughout the work.

My choice of instruments is explained by their aptness for the film’s major characters. In Jackson’s novel, the surprisingly cultivated Indian hero Alessandro is depicted as an accomplished violinist; so he is here associated with that instrument. The fragile, mercurial grace of Mary Pickford’s Ramona requires the airy charm of the flute. Griffith’s film downplays the crucial role of the Californio aristocrat Felipe, but I have chosen to restore some of his dignity with a cello theme of some nobility and compassion. His mother, the formidable Señora Moreno, is characterized by the harpsichord, the quintessential instrument of aristocratic Spain, in part through its association with the eminent eighteenth-century composers Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler. The harpsichord also serves as an effective stand-in for the lute or guitar, in such scenes as Alessandro’s serenade.

The musical themes likewise are intended to provide characterization, but they also evoke the film’s settings and narrative incidents. The various Spanish dance rhythms, for example, suggest nineteenth-century California, while the three scenes with religious doings feature music that is based on the ‘Pange lingua’ plainchant, long used in Spanish church music. Ramona’s music often employs the whole-tone scale, reflecting the ambiguity of her position between white and Indian worlds, while driving rhythms and extreme dissonance characterize the violence of the Anglo villains. In particular, a grotesque deformation of Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” provides the proper sense of menace and ironically suggests racial attitudes of the era. This is first heard when the whites destroy Alessandro’s village. Alessandro is arguably the film’s central figure, and his own theme pervades the score in many guises. One key instance is its use as the basis for the funereal march of the dispossessed couple; later it becomes the theme of the atonal fugue that underscores Alessandro’s madness.

Throughout the score I have regularly combined and superimposed my themes. These techniques are designed to suggest the thoughts and desires of the characters—and beyond that, both to clarify the story and to deepen the impact of this important, moving film.—Charles Shadle

Further Information and Reading
The setting for the opening of this film, Rancho Camulos—now the Rancho Camulos Museum—was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000; for visiting information see www.ranchocamulos.org.

Chon Noriega, who provides audio commentary for Ramona, writes about the film in “Birth of the Southwest: Social Protest, Tourism, and D.W. Griffith’s Ramona,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi (Rutgers University Press, 1996). A recent biography of Ramona’s author is Kate Philips’s Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (University of California Press, 2003).

About the Archive
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