Ramona (1928)

Tonight's lineup on TCM is 24 hours of silent movies, more or less. Actually, there are a couplf of documentaries that are silent related such as one on Irving Thalberg overnight at 1:00 AM (or this evening if you're on the west coast). There's also some stuff I don't think I've heard of, such as The First Degree at 10:00 PM. But I'm really writing about the lineup because it gave me the chance to watch a movie that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time: the 1928 version of Ramona, which you can see at 5:00 AM tomorrow.

Dolores Del Rio plays the titular Ramona, a mixed-race woman in California about the time it became as US state, so a time when there was a fairly diverse mix of people. There were the Mexicans who had run the place and still owned grand haciendas, such as the widowed Señora Moreno (Vera Lewis) and her adult son Felipe (Roland Drew). There are Anglos moving in thanks to the discovery of gold, and there are the descendants of the Temecula, one of the many tribes that had been living on the territory since well before the first Mexicans arrived.

Ramona is in fact half Mexican and half Temecula, although she doesn't know this at the start of the movie, as she's an orphan and raised like a foster daughter by the mistress of the ranch. Felipe very much likes Ramona, and would be OK with marrying Ramona although Mom definitely wouldn't approve of it and Ramona thinks of him more as a friend. In fact, Sra. Moreno only took care of Ramona as a big favor to Ramona's first set of foster parents.

And things are going to get a lot more complicated when Alessandro (Warner Baxter) comes along. He's the son of the last chief of the Temecula, but he's very muc westernized and devoutly Catholic. He's the foreman of the sheep shearers who have come to shear the sheep for the Morenos, but when he and Ramona see each other it's love at first sight. Sra. Moreno strongly opposes this marriage, telling Ramona that her (Ramona's father) had left a bunch of jewels that Ramona would inherit upon marrying a suitable person. And a Temecula is decidedly not suitable.

It's at this point that Ramona discovers she's actually half-Temecula herself, and that gives her the impetus to marry Alessandro, never mind that she'll lose her inheritance. She's too much in love, so she goes off with Alessandro, and they live happily ever after.

Oh hell no they don't. The movie's maybe half over at this point, so you know there's a lot to go, and it's a lot more like Lillian Gish in The Wind than it is a life of wedded bliss. Ramona and Alessando (and their kid) face bigotry wherever they go, which ultimately results in the death first of the couple's child, and then of Alessandro, the latter driving poor Ramona insane.

The plot of Ramona is in many ways pure hokum, but this particular telling of the story is very well made. It was thought to be lost for a long time, but a surviving print was found in the Czech film archives in 2010, and that print looks excellent. Del Rio and Lewis give good performances as the respective heroine and villainess of the piece, although they sometimes get a bit too showy with the sort of gestures that are necessary to express things that would soon be expressed with real dialogue you could hear.

If you didn't see the previous TCM showing which was already a couple of years ago, do yourself a favor and catch Ramona tonight.