Big Stakes (Latino Visions 1)

Director:
USA. 1922.
66. Tinted and Toned.

Cast:

Big Stakes

Directed by Earl Wayland Bowman

J.B. Warner, Elinor Fair, Les Bates, Willie Mae Carson, Hilliard Karr, R. Henry Grey, Ethelbert Knott.

Ramona, A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian

1910. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Cast: Mary Pickford [Ramona], Henry B. Walthall, Kate Bruce and Francis J. Grandon. From the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Cinematography by G.W. Bitzer. Filmed at Rancho Camulos, Piru and San Gabriel, California. 17 minutes. Music score composed by Maria Newman.

LATINO VISIONS-DISC ONE

Ramona, A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian

1910. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Cast: Mary Pickford [Ramona], Henry B. Walthall, Kate Bruce and Francis J. Grandon. From the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. Cinematography by G.W. Bitzer. Filmed at Rancho Camulos, Piru and San Gabriel, California. 17 minutes. Music score composed by Maria Newman.

The most expensive film of its day, D.W. Griffith with Mary Pickford combined to make this an enormous hit. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel of the mistreatment of Mission Indians was written in 1884 and has never been out of print. Ramona, a young girl growing up on her adoptive mother's ranch in California, falls in love with the Indian, Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry him, the two lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the bigotry and greed of the white landowners. Even though it was fictional, Ramona tourist sites still persist throughout southern California. (Griffith made sure to use the original locations from the novel.) Author William Drew writes of the film: “Griffith succeeded in stripping away the element of romanticism that had accrued to the popular story through many years of tourist promotion, restoring the original essence of Jackson's narrative as a forceful arraignment of the white racist oppression of the Native American.”

Big Stakes

1922. Directed by Earl Wayland Bowman. Cast: J.B. Warner and Elinor Fair. 66 minutes. Tinted and Toned. Music score composed by Donald Sosin.

One of the most breathtaking 35mm tinted and toned nitrate prints from the silent era (see http://milestonefilms.com/movie.php/BigStakes/ for some frame blowups), the Library of Congress has graciously provided Milestone with an exceptional video master of this silent cult classic. BIG STAKES is an entertaining, exciting, hilarious – and yes, strange – addition to cinema history and Latino studies. What else can you call a film that involves a lovely señorita, a hell-bent buckaroo, a dangerous Mexican captain, a poisonous Gila monster, the KKK … and everybody’s fate, the big stakes, decided on by two "brincadores?" That would be Mexican jumping beans. Which, as you may know, neither jump nor are actually beans...

Mercedes Aloyez, the daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher, is betrothed to Captain Montaya. The rootin’ tootin’ buckaroo Jim Gregory (complete with comic sidekick) is in love with the ladies, but with a special eye towards barkeep Mary Moore. While out riding, Gregory saves Mercedes from a fate worse then death. (Well, actually, it is death.) The cowboy falls for the señorita, which earns the Mexican Captain’s displeasure. When Mercedes and Gregory meet for a nighttime rendezvous, they are captured by the Mexican soldiers. The Captain threatens them with the infamous and deadly Gila monster, but the resourceful cowboy bets his life against the captain’s with, of course, a race between Mexican jumping beans. A victorious (well, his bean, anyway) Gregory spares the honorable Captain and asks Mercedes to choose whom she loves. This uncomfortable situation is interrupted by the KKK (okay, actually the white-robed and a matching white hood-ensembled “Night Riders”) who have captured Mary. Gregory rides out to the rescue and upon return, discovers that Mercedes loves the Captain – and that he has a renewed fondness for Mary. BIG STAKES is a fun and rip-roarin' ride across the plains of western -- and Western -- cinema. And for 1922, a fascinating and complex look at Mexican and American stereotypes.

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