Tue 12 May 2009
Movie Review: RAMONA (1910).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews , Silent films[9] Comments
RAMONA. Biograph, 1910. Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Francis J. Grandon, Kate Bruce, W. Chrystie Miller. Based on the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Director: D.W. Griffith.
If cutting Crime and Punishment down to a 90 minute movie was a considerable feat, as discussed briefly here, a few posts back, then how about a 200 to 300 page novel that’s trimmed down to a very quick 17 minutes?
It can’t be done, but it was, and the result is about as good (or bad) as you might expect.
Starting with the positive, the photography is quite remarkable. But there are no dialogue cards, only brief statements of what the next scene is to display, and in the two reels, there’s only enough time to get the gist of things, no more.
Subtitled “The Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian,” a Spanish girl in California (Mary Pickford) marries an Indian (Henry B. Walthall), they have a child, and as the subtitle suggests, they do not live happily ever after. The gun-toting white settlers who keep moving the small family on do not come off at all well in this movie.
This movie is to be watched for its historical significance, and — unless you tell me otherwise — for little other reason. Thankfully it still exists to be watched today, nearly 100 years later.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
There’s another D.W.Griffith film of this era more pertinent to mystery fans, The Musketeers of Pig Alley with Lilian Gish, is a two reeler that may well be the first ever gangster/crime film. As with Ramona the enjoyment is largely historical, but it is fun to see some of the cliches already in place that early.
Pickford and Walthall in Ramona are among the first big movie stars, Pickford eventually forming United Artists with then hubby Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Charlie Chaplin. She was the darling of the silent cinema and the toast of Hollywood with the estate she and Fairbanks built, Pickfair. After divorcing Doug she married Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, who costarred with Richard Arlen and a young Gary Cooper in the classic Wings.
Walthall made his name in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the paen to the Klan, where he played the hero known as ‘the Little Colonel.’ Some critics still argue that despite it’s subject matter and blatant racism Birth is the greatest film of all time. A difficult point to make if you have ever sat through it, but historically and technically it is revolutionary for its time.
Ironic that Griffith also made Intolerance, a plea against religious and racial intolerance, and a talkie bio of Lincoln with Walter Huston. Often called — with some justification — the man who invented the movies, Griffith, among other innovations created the close up (for star Lilian Gish). Griffith’s use of the camera save his films from the more static look of some early films or the frantic movement we associate with silents (often a result of there being no standard number of frames at the time).
Hard to believe that at one time no one thought viewers would sit still longer than twenty minutes to watch a film. Even as late as Gone With the Wind the amount of time an audience would sit still in a theater was being debated.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:13 am
I agree with Steve’s points. I had to watch RAMONA twice to figure out what was going on, and had help the 2nd time from the DVD commentary. But it also does have outstanding photography, and once one gets the hang of the story, it becomes an involving and worthwhile film.
My favorite early Griffith film is CORNER IN WHEAT. This shows a commodity trader getting rich as wheat prices rice – while poor people starve because they can’t afford bread. It is still relevant, scathing, and powerfully filmed. Like THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY, this is available on DVD and for free on Youtube.
THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY (1912) is still of significance, as an early crime film about street corner gangs in New York City. But I prefer a film made by Griffith’s pupil, Raoul Walsh, on the same subject, REGENERATION (1915). This film is much more approachable for a modern audience. One can easily follow the gripping story and characters. This is on DVD, paired with a delightful comedy-with-crime-elements film, YOUNG ROMANCE. Already by 1915, these films show full modern story-telling conventions.
Griffith is the exact analogue in film, of G.K.Chesterton in prose mystery fiction. Both men were:
1) Genuinely talented, highly influential creators at their best;
2) Genuine hard-core racists at their worst.
This leaves both men very hard to deal with. There are no easy answers on how to respond. Both are far too talented in their best (and non-racist) work to ignore. But neither can we dismiss their ugly racist side, in their worst output. Or pretend it doesn’t exist. It is absolutely rotten.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’ve become interested in the career of Mary Pickford, and the one or two page summaries of her life on the Internet don’t begin to answer my questions:
For example: Why and how did she become so popular, making a million dollars a year in an era when a million dollars was a huge, enormous amount of money? Why did she end her career after only three or four talking pictures — where they that bad, or did audiences tastes really change that quickly?
As for your quandary, Mike, I don’t have any answers either. I guess we just have to accept Griffith and Chesterton as flawed people, as we all are, in one way or another. When people are creative innovators in a field, though, it just makes it that much harder to accept their shortcomings.
Does saying that they were of another era help? Sometimes it does to me, but not all of the time.
— Steve
May 14th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
If we are going to only read and watch books and films by nice people it’s going to be a fairly short list. I don’t know why talent so often goes with questionable personality traits, but it is nothing new. Carrivaggio may well have been a murderer, Rimbaud and Verlaine went out of their way to offend everyone, and the less said about Poe the man the better.
I don’t know what the solution is other than recognizing human frailty. Can we forgive Celine and Knut Hamsun their Nazi sympathy? Do we forgive Hammett for championing Stalin long after even the Soviets had admitted he was a monster? Chandler is a homophobe, Conan Doyle believed in fairies, and Donald Mackenzie, Talbot Mundy and Karl May were criminals before they reformed.
I don’t know the answer. Hemingway was a bully, Fitzgerald and Faulkner drunks, and John Ford, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger all had strong sadistic streaks on the set and off. I suspect it is a matter of weighing the work and not the man, and choosing for yourself what you can tolerate and accept.
And Steve has a point about the era when a book was written or a film was made. Without the perspective of history the views of earlier eras can seem monstrous.
For mystery readers I can recommend a fine book by Colin Watson (author of the Inspector Purbright mysteries), Snobbery With Violence, a study of the popular literature of the classic period and how it reflected and sometimes exaggerated public opinion. He makes good points about the casual anti-Semitism of the time and how little it reflected actual behavior as well as what seems to us now to be intolerable snobbery.
I don’t think that means we have to accept it, only accept that it exists, and that what would be unforgivable in 2009 is at least understandable in 1912. Most of us have (or had) grandparents we loved despite things they said that sometimes galled us. I’m not willing to discard Chesterton because he made absurd racist statements anymore than I’m willing to reject Kipling or Spillane for their less charming traits and beliefs.
Mike is right, we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore it, but we can deal with it by knowing what we believe. And I’ll grant the more talented the individual the easier it is to show forgiveness. I find it much easier to forgive Edgar Rice Burroughs’s slips than those of Roy Rockwood of the Bomba books.
Incidentally, if you want to test your ability to stretch your own tolerance, check out the 1942 film Baron Munchausen, a beautiful full color fantasy film that is in a class with The Theif of Baghdad or the Wizard of Oz — the only problem being it was made in Nazi Germany under the auspices of Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. It’s a wonderful film — if you can get over where and when it was made.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I like Wagner’s music despite the fact the man was a despicable troll and his work embraced by Hitler. Hitler loved Karl May’s books too, but so did Einstein, Herman Hesse, and Schwietzer. You have to choose for yourself where you draw the line. Anyway, if I can enjoy Ayn Rand’s books despite her personality I think I can forgive almost anything within reason.
May 14th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
It is now impossible to PROVE any theory about why Mary Pickford was popular. But a guess:
Mary Pickford often played spunky young women, who struggled with adversity. Women audiences could strongly identify with this.
Also, Pickford often worked with first rate technicians. Her films can be of high technical quality.
A recommendation: DADDY-LONG-LEGS (Marshal Neilan, 1919) is my favorite Pickford vehicle. This is a delightful drama, with Mary as a spunky orphan. It also shows the very high photographic quality of the best silent films. Silent movies were often marvels of craftsmanship. Pickford could and did hire the best technicians in the world for her films.
Mystery fans today know the high quality of 1910’s mystery fiction: Bentley, Freeman, Chesterton, Reeve, Bramah, McIntyre, Wells and so many others. The same is true of films.
May 14th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
PS I’ve never seen any of Pickford’s talkies. I don’t know much about her career per se.
She never lost her money, and it was financially easy for her to retire, live in her huge mansion, etc.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
There is some detail about Pickford in Richard Shickel’s book about Douglas Fairbanks Sr., His Picture in the Papers, and in his book on silent films They Had Faces Then, and The Silent Superstar by Robert Gottlieb.
At a time when innocence and youth were idealised Pickford was the epitomy of all that meant. Her films were major productions and featured only the best at all levels. She and the studios guarded her image and her career. There were no scandals, mistakes, or bad interviews in the press. She was carefully and cannily marketed by both the studio and by Mary Pickford. By the time the talkies came along public taste had changed, Pickford was middle aged, and divorced from Fairbanks. She withdrew from the public eye, largely to preserve the image they still had of her as forever young and innocent. She continued to rule Hollywood society from Pickfair long after though.
Why was she such a major star? I don’t think anyone has ever answered that question about any superstar. It’s a combination of timing, talent, luck, and the public mood. Some like Doug Fairbanks Sr. worked very hard at it, and others like Pickford didn’t have to. That said, she was by all accounts a canny business woman and one of the first stars to become a power behind the screen as well as in front.
Mike, I share your admiration of these early films. The idea that silent films are all quaint and vaguely laughable comes from an ignorance of just how powerful the silent cinema could be, and a forgetfulness that many stars of the talkies got their start in the silents like Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, William Powell, and Joan Crawford. Not to mention directors like Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Raoul Walsh, Wellman, Capra, and de Mille.
Granted acting styles were a bit more expressive before sound and some subtilties we take for granted in sound films aren’t there, but then some of the camera use by the great creators of the period wasn’t recreated on screen until the golden age of the talkie cinema. TCM has been good about showing some of these films, from rarities like the Joe May/Fritz Lang serial The Indian Tomb and Feuillade’s Les Vampires, to classics with Lon Chaney and Greta Garbo rescored and restored.
It may take a little readjustment to get into the mood of a silent film, but no lowering of standards. Some silent films like King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1917), Lang’s Siegfried, Fred Niblo’s Ben Hur (1925), Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary, Allan Dwan’s Thief of Baghdad with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., the 1925 Tom Mix version of Riders of the Purple Sage, or Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera are simply great films featuring star turns and production values equal to the best of the talkie era. And if you have never seen Buster Keaton work you are in for a treat. Watch Buster at work and you will no longer need a definition for genius.
Of course the farther back you go the cruder the films are likely to be. You may wonder at what early audiences saw in Broncho Billy Anderson, or suppress a smile at Elmo Lincoln’s Tarzan (though in one scene you are seeing him kill an actual lion that went wild on the set, and not wrestling with a lion skin rug like later jungle films), and humor is apt to be broad and lean toward slapstick (hard to do Noel Coward without sound).
The serials of Pearl White and Ruth Rolland are pretty crude, and you will discover that among the many talents Harry Houdini possessed, acting wasn’t one of them, but then I can’t imagine anyone watching Houdini for the acting anyway. Not everyone can embrace silent films, but if you can the rewards are great. Gloria Swanson’s character in Sunset Boulevard is right, “(they) had faces then.”
May 21st, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I don’t think either Chesterton or Griffith were “hardcore” racists. Looking over the core of Griffith’s filmwork, I think it more likely that Griffith was deeply ambivalent and so difference between the central conflicts in “The Klansmen” (the novel on which “Birth of a Nation” is based) and Roberta. Griffith seemed to be stunned by the blowback from “BoaN” which is why he turned around and made “Intolerance”.
Chesterton’s main problem was for the most part was with Jews. Even here he’s not as “hardcore” as many distinguished anti-Semites such as Tolstoy, Henry Ford, Martin Luther, or even Karl Marx. He lived long enough to see the rise of Hitler and warned against him.
Most of the anti-Semitic instances in GKC’s fiction including the most egregious story “Dukes” seem to be aimed at fantastically wealthy Jews who he feels are influencing English policy wrongly. The Jewish restaurant owner in “The Queer Feet” is portrayed as a fairly decent fellow. Chesterton is at base no more anti-Semitic than those people who rant about Neo-Cons today.
As for blacks, GKC’s “God of the Gongs” is a bit cringe inducing, but seems targeting more at Paganism. Although, Chesterton doesn’t seem to have even a rudimentary knowledge of how Voodoo really works. In this story, a celebrated 1910s black boxing champ gets in trouble nor for having a white girlfriend like in “The Great White Hope” but for orchestrating human sacrifices on unsuspecting audience members while he is performing. There are passages which will probably give black readers qualms particularly when Fr. Brown’s discovery of evidence of the fighter’s guilt leads to the mass expulsion of all black people from England. In the end, Father Brown predicts that the fighter will outwit the English detectives and escape justice, showing GKC did not believe blacks were naturally stupid.
GKC appears to have taken the side of the natives over the British in the Boer War, and he joked that the phrase “white man” evoked something out of Poe.
A much more racist reference to blacks can be found in H. G. Wells’s “The Sleeper Wakes” in the references to the “The Black Police”. Basically, the tyrant having led a popular revolution to gain power want to bring in black Africans as police in order to control the populace so he doesn’t have to deliver on sharing the wealth. Nearly every character’s comment on this practice seems derisive of black people in general, even when the blacks have their one seen where the hero kills of en masse. It’s really hard to believe that Heinlein thought this book be a great sales tool for the cryogenics industry. (See A DOOR INTO SUMMER.)
November 5th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I’m very late in coming into this discussion, but what the hey!
In looking at Griffith’s career, “Ramona” is an important early indication of Griffith’s sympathy for other cultures and races. This attitude is seen in “Intolerance,” “Broken Blossoms,” and his later “south-seas” films.
Looking at “The Birth of a Nation,” I would keep two things in mind. One, Griffith was fascinated with the Civil War, and had made a quite a number of shorts at Biograph featuring different stories, particularly ones sympathetic to the southern soldiers. The other thing to remember is that Griffith was trying to create a huge hit. Lots of people mention that story of “The Birth of a Nation” was adapted from the novel, “The Clansman” (which was also the original title of the film, I think). But the novel, while popular, is not really all that important. What’s important was the play (adapted by the novel’s author) which ran for nearly a year on Broadway in 1906, and then had at least four national tours. (In fact the 4th national tour was still going on at the time that Griffith made “Ramona.”) “The Clansman” also had a sequel, “The Traitor,” which also ran national tours for years. It was a huge hit, and was seen all over the country. The play, “The Clansman,” is reported to have run for 26 weeks in Chicago.
So in choosing this property, Griffith was taking on a subject he was interested in that had already had huge success.
That doesn’t exonerate him from the genuine racism of the second half of “Birth of a Nation,” but it does tell us that this was a story that had proven palatable to a huge national audience.
It was most certainly, a very different time.