Ramona (1910)

TCM is running Coquette this morning at 11:00 AM. It's the movie that won Mary Pickford her Best Actress Oscar, although I can't help but think it's a career achievement award since the acting is overwrought and because Pickford made most of her movies before the Academy Awards. But if you haven't seen Coquette before, it's worth at least one watch.

Pickford's career goes back a long way, to when she was an 18-year-old which would mean around 1910. One of her earliest is a version of the oft-filmed novel Ramona. This one was made out in California before the movie community decamped there for the better climate; most of the time D.W. Griffith and the other filmmakers were still back in the New York area.

A lot of Griffith's silent work survives, or at least more than a lot of other directors; as I understand it Griffith donated some of his work to the Museum of Modern Art for preservation. Ramona survives and, being from 1910, is in the public domain, which means that it's unsurprisingly ended up on Youtube: