The Red Kimona opens with producer (and uncredited director) Dorothy Davenport Reid introducing the audience to the unfortunate and true tale of Gabrielle Darley. Desperate to flee her miserable family life, Gabrielle (played by Priscilla Bonner), runs off with a mustachioed con man who promptly situates her in a New Orleans brothel. Trailing the man to Los Angeles, she espies him buying a wedding ring for another woman and, on impulse, shoots him dead.
Her tortured life is relayed to a sympathetic jury which eventually acquits her. A society matriarch makes Gabrielle her protegee, but Gabrielle is not suited to a life to which she cannot contribute, fine being that she actually is. Unhappily, she drifts back to prostitution until fate intervenes. Reid closes the film by imploring women "to face our responsibility."
The film refuses to condemn Gabrielle for she is not "immoral,'' but society and the men who sexually exploit her certainly are. Wallace Reid, Davenport's husband, became famous as the bare-chested blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation (1915). In 1919 Reid was badly injured in a train wreck. His pain was managed by morphine, the drug that killed him in 1923. Soon after, Davenport attended a narcotics conference with writer Adela Rogers St. Johns and returned determined to make a film about the ravages of drug addiction. Together they made Human Wreckage, which was a hit and allowed Davenport to finance her own production company. The Red Kimona was the third of her social issue films (a genre which preceded her with the work of Lois Weber and succeeded her with director Ida Lupino's films) and the only one that survives. The Archive has restored the film to match the original negative; particularly noteworthy is the red tinting of Gabrielle's kimono (misspelled in the film 's title as "kimona").
—Andrea Alsberg
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