Ramona (Twentieth Century-Fox). The cinema's recent investigation of the U. S. past including to date The Gorgeous Hussy, Robin Hood of Eldorado, Hearts Divided, The Plainsman, The Texas Rangers, Last of the Mohicans and Daniel Boone (see col. 3), now broadens to include Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson's quiet classic about a ranch-girl's love-life in the San Jacinto mountains, circa 1870. Ramona herself is half-historical, half-fictional, half-white and half-Indian, but there is nothing halfway in the manner in which Twentieth Century-Fox has handled her biography. It has used the simple framework as a bitter disquisition on the traditional white methods of dealing with Indians, civilized or raw. In addition, the cinemagoer gets a memorable love story, a handsome technicolor picture gallery of California's southern highlands.
Ramona (Loretta Young) did not know about her Indian blood. Senora Moreno (Pauline Frederick) in whose house she lived, had brought her up like a white girl and she was loved by the Senora's son Phillipe (Kent Taylor). However, she was glad when she found out that her father's wife had been a squaw because it left her free to marry Alesandro (Don Ameche, late of NBC's Grand Hotel hour). They had a happy life until white usurpers put them oft the land they farmed. Trekking in the rain to new lands, their baby be came ill. Alesandro stole a horse to fetch the medicine that might save his daughter. Tracked down and killed by the horse's owner, he left Ramona to dubious happiness with Phillipe.
The attempt to froth a happy ending over Ramona's widow-weeds is not a major flaw. The picture is so pictorially arresting it might almost do without a story. Dark cottonwoods and yellow wheat, the greens and reds and rolling con-tours of the San Jacinto mountains where it was filmed, spread themselves out for the technicolor camera like a war-chief's blanket. Historically accurate since there has been little change in the landscape since 1870, Ramona pours its eye-filling opulence through many frames: Ramona's wedding breakfast, the horse race at the Fiesta, Alesandro driving his sheep to San Diego, ploughing in the sun, racing a Palomino pony through a field of wheat.
Daniel Boone (RKO), the week's second item of Americana, was originally produced as a George O'Brien Western. It turned out better, partly because it is a relatively faithful adaptation of history, partly because Cinemactor O'Brien's chesty musculature fits perfectly the aver age conception of famed Long Hunter Boone, a middle-sized man who, wrote Audubon, "appeared gigantic."