Nell's sequel… Back to God's Country (1919), Kennington Bioscope with John Sweeney

Nell Shipman was an almost impossible woman. Not so much difficult to deal with as difficult to deter not by wind, rain or snow and certainly not by lack of financial backing or even a man... She made films in the harshest of conditions and, here, she turned adversity into Canada’s most successful silent film.

Before we begin: consider the similarities between the films of Victor Sjöström and Nell Shipman? Lots of snow and scenic splendour but whereas the Outlaw and his Wife faced some fearsome drifts you had the feeling that the crew would be snuggly back in their chalets after the shoot whereas the Shipman operation was further out in all ways.

Strapped for cash and occasionally nearly drowning in rapids or under the ice at Priest Lake, Nell Shipman was a stunt woman too. Her stories may contain corn but… just hear her roar!

Nell Shipman

Directed by David Hartford and based on Nell’s adaptation of James Oliver Curwood’s short story: Wapi, the Walrus, Back to God’s Country took the actress back to the character and scene of her previous hit, God’s Country and the Woman (no, not Yorkshire but somewhere far cooler, the stunning mountains of Alberta…).

According to biographer Kay Armatage, Shipman knew the limitations of her source material saying that it “was trash as a movie; a mere outline, a character study of a Great Dane dog and how he reacted to the need of the woman he loved…” but she knew what to do to spice things up: melodrama, pure evil, skinny dipping – at length – and a dog sled chase across the ice that would have done Abel Gance proud. The cinematography of Dal Clawson and, especially, Joseph Walker, who had learned a trick or two from working with Billy Bitzer, is stunning throughout and here he seems to be mounted on a third sleigh following the two in jumpy action mode.

Action on the ice

But Shipman also liked Walker because he knew how to make her look good in the daylight by opening the lens as wide as he could without over-exposing, rendering her in well-rounded contrast against a softened hard landscape. It’s these details that make Nell so good – she controlled so much of these productions and, whilst they were intended s escapist entertainment she arguably had a message concerning the environment and animal conservation well before those words were in common currency.

Armatage sees a lot of subtext in the way Shipman draws Inuit characters – women brought in to entertain sailors and who she tries to help, as well as wise old “yellow men” (she affords more respects than the cringe-worthy phrase might convey to modern readers) as well as her approach to nature. This was still, as she says, a moment in cinema history “dominated by independent and artisanal innovation… and maverick individualist entrepreneurship”. Before the studios and the men – literally – took charge and forced women like Shipman and Lois Weber out.

Shipman was a populist though and not averse to using her own physique to sell her film even playing on her nude scenes in the publicity: “Don’t book Back to God’s Country unless You want to prove that the Nude is NOT Rude!” Well done Bioscope for taking the brave decision in this instance!

Armatage again sees this surprising sequence as evidence of Shipman’s forthright desire to both challenge existing social mores as well as express her ideas of liberation through nature. Her nudity is shared by a bear (and yes, Nell made a private joke about a bear behind!) as well as two baddies who look on lustfully only to be repelled by said Grizzly – more likely Brown – Bear?

What is so clear to even less academically-qualified modern viewers is Shipman putting herself willingly at the centre of male gazing. But then she was so remarkably in control as her energies moved her ever forward.

A woman's best friend

She reportedly clashed with the author over her expansion of the female lead’s role at the expense of the four-legged “hero” but this was Nell’s show and she was running it.

After an introductory segment showing how Wapi the Great Dane (actually played by two dogs, Tresore and Rex) fell into the hands of viscous criminals we are introduced to the idyllic wilderness retreat of Delores LeBeau (Nell) her father Baptiste (Roy Laidlaw) and her fiancé Peter (Wheeler Oakman) a government cartographer.

Boo! Rydal thinks it's rude

Into this wilderness paradise comes a snake in the form of hard-going psychopath Rydal (Wellington A. Playter) who has already killed a Mountie before he spies the naked Delores and decides she’s the one for him. Rydal feigns injury to inveigle himself into the household with his side kick (Charles B. Murphy) and is only prevented from raping Delores by her father knifing his buddy.

He pretends to arrest the old man and then throws him in rapids losing out on his prey as she leaps into the water in a vain attempt to try save him. We clearly see Nell riding the rapids: I hope it was a warm day…

The years pass and Delores and Peter live in the city. Duty calls him onto a boat to the frozen North for cartographical work and you’ll never believe who the ship’s captain is!? Yes, it’s Rydal and he’s out to finish what he started.

Even in her city aprtment, Delores dreams of her wilderness

Injuring Peter 200 miles from the nearest doctor, Rydal thinks he only has to wait it out until Delores husband passes on but he reckons without his targets indomitable spirit and her super-natural way with animals. Diving into a fight between a mad Great Dane – yes Wapi! – and huskies she forms an instant bond and makes a four-legged friend who’ll stick with her through thick and thin…

Miles from nowhere… nature will always find a way.

Back to God's Country has some front and you can’t help but love it and Nell’s spirit. John Sweeney played along and got with the mood: romance, the great outdoors and life or death chases across the snowscapes all captured with pin-point piano-precision!

We learned a lot more about Nell in the first half with a screening of Girl From God’s Country (2014), Karen Day’s vibrant documentary on Nell and her legacy. There were fascinating interviews with Shipman’s great-granddaughter, granddaughter and son all of whom radiate with pride at what she achieved. I hope she knew how much she was valued by the time of her death in 1970.

The film also reveals the forgotten legacy of a generation of female silent film pioneers – not just Nell, Alice Guy and Lois Weber but also minority filmmakers, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Miriam Wong.

Women were pro-actively squeezed out of the pictures by the male studio system and even today levels of directors, producers and writers are not at the same level as the 1910’s.

OK. It's not rude!

All of this is covered in the excellent book Silent Women and some of the books authors were on hand tonight, Ellen Cheshire and Melody Bridges who introduced the documentary.

Kay Aramatge's biography, The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema is available form all the old familiar places... 

Back to God’s Country is available on a cracking MilestoneDVD along with Something New – Nell’s car advert turned adventure romance. Recommended.

Top gear… Something New (1920)

“… the Maxwell went places no horse or even men on foot could traverse! We drove it over rocks bigger than itself, up canyons hub-deep in sand.”

In which Nell Shipman turns a car commercial into the World’s first horse and car race adventure film… and in which the resourceful one-woman cast and crew made a statement about equality and modernity.

After the huge success of Back to God’s Country and with her marriage to Ernest Shipman disintegrating, Nell headed south to make independent films in California. Then, as now, you took what commissions you could get and she was asked by the Hudson-Essex Automobile Agency to make two commercials for the Maxwell car.

Maid, man and motor

The first was a female buddy two-reeler Trail of the Arrow, in which Nell and her pal Marjorie Cole (they co-owned a sports car in real life) take off like Geena and Susan in order to race a misogynist (Bob Battle) over the Mojave Desert. The film is sadly lost but if there were any doubts as to Nell’s intentions – apart from demonstrating her car’s superior engineering - she made it crystal clear: “I have proven that woman is on a par with man in driving a car, as she is in every other walk of life.”

Cars and movies had developed side by side and men had become more associated with the former than the latter with “women drivers” being regarded as… well the mere fact the gender was appended says it all. Before Nell, Mary Pickford, Bebe Daniels and fellow actor-director Mabel Normand were among women taking the wheel in winning ways but Something New drove the point home even harder.

The new and the old

Nell takes control right from the off with a framing sequence showing her poised under a tree with her typewriter waiting for inspiration to strike. She sees her partner-to-be Bert Van Tuyle driving a handsome Maxwell car and chatting to a man on horseback: the new and the old… eureka, her ideas arrive and she starts pounding on the keys.

Nell plays a "Writer Woman" who is sent to stay with her Uncle Sid (L.M. Wells) in Mexico where she seeks atmosphere and adventure. As her uncle waits he chats to a Maxwell car driver, Bill Baxter (Bert) and, not knowing how his niece has grown up, they both assume she is the bookish blue-stocking that first emerges but no, it’s the handsome, wholesome woman laughing at their presumption in the coach.

Laddie the Dog and Bert Van Tuyle

Nell – her character isn’t named – instantly clocks Bill’s smile in what Kay Armatage notes is a “reversion of the specularization process…”, and heads off to her uncle’s gold mine… A gold mine? In Mexico you say?! Won’t be long before it’s attacked by bandits! And it is as the nasty Agrilla Gorgez (Merrill McCormick) strikes Sid to the ground and his band of desperados begin to load his gold onto their horses. Nell hides away with their dog (Laddie the Dog!) but disobeys Sid’s orders by trying to save him forcing a Mexican standoff with the Mexicans. Nell gives way to save her kin and is taken away to their hideout in Devil’s Kitchen leaving the old man trussed up to die…

Gorgez played a mean guitar

Enter Bill who arrives in time to rescue Sid and to be told of Nell’s fate… but there are no horses left on the farm, how can Bill follow the gang? Well, the Maxwell not only has lines of sleek elegance but also an unrivalled suspension system and fuel consumption to die for… there’s nowhere four legs can go that four wheels can’t follow!

So begins the epic chase that forms the bulk of the action as the Maxwell is put through its paces over rock and dune, through sagebrush and sand across impossible gradients in pursuit of the bandits. It’s not much of a plot but, like the Maxwell’s tyres, it’s gripping… partly because of Nell’s editing but also because there are clearly moments of genuine danger.

Consider the remarkable suspension and road-holding of the Model 25...

The car rolled three times in the picture each time leaving its human cargo intact and that doesn’t include the moment when “The Girl” – hands actually tied behind her back for effect – fell off one of the bandit’s horses and banged her head on a  rock…

Bill finds the bandit’s lair and arrives just in time to rescue Nell from a fate worse than death at the hands of Gorgez and then things really kick on as he gets injured trying to hold off the men and Nell drives to his rescue. Now it’s the woman’s turn to drive and Nell takes on the same rocks and the same angles as her former racing car driver pal Bert only now they have a gang on their heels firing bullets.

Men on horseback... ha!

You can’t help but shift in your seat as the Maxwell crawls its way over huge boulders, occasionally getting stuck but always managing to find a way forward. Bill gets shot in the head and then shoulder but Nell manages to avoid their crashing over a cliff and even reverses into a boulder pushing it down onto the pursuing pack.

Nell at the wheel

Shipman makes the most of her budget – a mere $14,000 – and makes an adventure that still entertains and one that spoke volumes about her own resourcefulness and commitment.  William M. Drew commented that “…Nell Shipman mastered the action-adventure genre to an extent unmatched in cinema history by any other woman director.” He also highlights Something New’s “harmonizing motifs” uniting “the masculine and the feminine, industrialism and environmentalism…”

The relationship between The Girl and Bill is one of “true comradeship” and, what Armatage also sees as “…a new sexual partnership” between an emancipated woman and her equal. Something new indeed!

Laddie's the only one not smiling!

I watched the Milestone films DVD which also includes Back to God’s Country which I’m saving for a live screening sometime, somewhere… It’s available direct on the Milestone site.

Kay Armatage’s biography The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema is published by the University of Toronto Press and available from Amazon and others.

William M. Drew’s quotes are from the intriguingly titled Something New: Speeding Sweethearts of the Silent Screen 1908-1921. His website is here.

Innovative shock absorbers in action...

Model 25 Maxwell touring cars originally cost just $695 and had high-tension magneto ignition, electric horn, an (optional) electric starter and an innovative shock absorber to protect the radiator as can be seen in the film. One has recently been sold by Bonhams for $5,720 - full recommissioning required.

“Now the moral is, be it motor or maid – there is always something new!”

The revenant… The Grub-Stake (1923)

“… no one who has not gone for broke, all out, all of the way… knows what it means to watch the unreeling of twelve-thousand feet of film which carries his colours to victory or defeat.” Nell Shipman

A revenant is a “visible ghost” returned to haunt the living and in Nell Shipman’s case the spectre both inspires and amazes. This was a woman who not only overcame impossible financial odds to make this film but who relocated her crew, cast and zoo to the frozen wastes of Ohio before climbing 6,000 feet to film the climax in which she dangles herself off a sheer rock face. DeCaprio you’re a wimp!

The hills are alive

By the time Shipman and partner/co-producer/nominal co-director Bert Van Tuyle came to make this film they were on their uppers and their company was in deep financial trouble. They sold their house in California, their car and even their piano to help finance The Grub-Stake as well as raising contributions from 300 subscribers. Their final budget was $180,000 which for an undertaking of this scale was hopelessly inadequate but Shipman had a vision and she wanted it realized.

Nell’s spirit comes through in her written words and as the above quote shows, she had a sense of humour to match her drive. She needed it as this was the biggest risk imaginable for the “Girl from God’s Country”, as she was named after two successful films featuring her battling the elements of Ohio.

Nell Shipman: in the studio and out of doors

As she suggests below, Nell's script for The Grub-Stake has everything in it and the kitchen sink – which her character Faith Diggs uses to run a home laundry business. It’s a high energy film which cuts quickly and moves at pace, possibly reflecting the challenges of its low ratio of film shot to film required – just 50,000 feet from which to edit those precious “12,000”.

The breathless finale was filmed atop Lookout Mountain – at 6,727 feet the highest in the region and more than a couple of thousand up on Ben Nevis, Britain’s champion peak – having to lug equipment up on the backs of protesting pack horses. Honestly Nell, you could have picked an easier location but no she went high and it is rewarded as the views make for a stunning backdrop as she hangs onto a tree root on the side of a sheer cliff face. It’s a stunning conclusion that sets the emotions and the pulse racing – to all her other attributes add stunt-woman and her editing (who else) is superb.

Nell hangs on tight

As Nell later said: “…it had a sockeroo finish! It brought to customers that dimple we aim to create so it may cup their shed tears…”

The plot is how you hipsters say, “bat-dropping” crazy, and shows Nell’s lively mind in overdrive creating an improbable world just around the bend from our believable own. Nell plays Faith Diggs a woman who combines work in an artist’s materials shop with life modelling and a home laundry service.

Skipper watches the ships and waits...

She does all this to care for her ailing father, a retired mariner named Skipper (Walt Whitman – the other one) who spends his days looking out of his window at the tall ships in the harbour. He puts his light in the window to illuminate Faith’s way home and already you can see the richness of Shipman’s ideas with any florid over-invention being counterbalanced by a lightness of tone in the intertitles.

But Shipman’s acting provides the clearest signal of her intent. She stands tall as the model wrapped in white cotton, standing as a partially-exposed mummy in front of a class of eager scribblers, her face mock serious yet soon gurning in horror as she has to shuffle out to deal with a customer.

Bare shoulders!

Bizarrely that customer is the film’s villain popped into pick up some brushes and paint for a friend up in the Yukon – the script is full of such long shots and intricate connections and this won’t be the last we see of those brushes… Mark Leroy is a gambler and business man played by Alfred Allen (who Wikipedia wrongly makes 36 at the time of the film when he was actually 56 and he looks it!) but Faith can’t see that only a charmer who takes an interest in her.

Faith loses her two art jobs after the proprietor returns to find her bare-shouldered. She traipses the streets looking for work and runs into Leroy again just as she is on the point of selling her improbably long hair. He invites her round on the pretext of photographing said locks but when she arrives she reveals they’ve all been chopped for cash. No matter, he didn’t really want to take her pic… he has more business-like concerns.

Well, would you trust this man?

Looking to make a new start for her and Skipper, Faith jumps at Leroy’s offer of a “grub-stake” – an advance on adventure based on a share of the returns, but rebuffs his attempts to take an early payback in kind. They travel north by ship and in a moment of calm madness, faith accepts a marriage proposal from the middle-aged manipulator… let’s say Faith is green; let’s say she trusts too easily and that she has, indeed, too much faith.

Dawson Kate evaluates the greenhorn's fashion sense

Reality bites once they arrive not once but three times… Leroy provides Faith with a new dress and invites her to a “party” at the local dance hall. The folk there are mighty friendly, especially the men but not Dawson Kate (Lillian Leighton) the “he-woman” (according to the intertitle) who runs the saloon with a rod of iron and a heart of rare softer metal. He soon reveals to Faith that firstly this ain’t no party, secondly hubby already has a wife… and thirdly Leroy has bought Faith here to trade as a sex-worker.

Overhearing the truth Faith is shocked to the core but then she hears that Leroy’s set his manservant (Ah Wing) to poison her father…

Malamute Mike and his best friend

At the start of the film we’re shown an old but intrepid frontiersman atop a hill with his faithful hound but by the time we see the man again he has become the town drunk, Malamute Mike (George Berrell) trailing around the string he used to tether his four legged friend in the belief that old Tucson is still there. He’s kicked out of the dance hall just in time to head to Skipper’s house and to slow down the poison plot long enough for Faith to come to the rescue.

Leroy duly thwarted, the trio have to flee before he finds out. Mike, drunkenly-deluded that he found some gold high in the mountains and at the end of the rainbow… decides to take them there. They take Leroy’s dogs and sleds and head for the frozen North.

Faith climbs higher

Now Shipman’s love of nature takes over and there are glorious segments in the snow. Faith has to forge on alone after their sled runs out of snow and ends up going higher and higher, lost in the upper perma-frosts forests as Mike goes for help from Kate’s son Jeb (Hugh Thompson), who lives in their cottage practicing his art and is indeed the person for whom Leroy bought the materials for right back at the start.

Faith discovers the bear necessities

There follows an interlude in which Faith survives the cold in just a linen shirt and winter dress, wandering lost until seeking refuge in a cave already occupied with a friendly brown bear… The sequence shows Faith communing with all manner of creatures – more bears, raccoon, badgers, marmosets, deer and wolves. All are at peace with this gentle soul although in reality the wolf sent to snuggle up as Faith sleeps, lunged at Nell’s face and later had to be put down.

Jeb arrives from nature

Spring seems to have sprung and one day as Faith sits watching two bears play-fighting in the stream Jeb arrives and almost rescues her before being told there is no need.

Now the stage is set as the two youngsters fall for each other, Jeb spots Mike’s marker for the gold and they find his old dog still in his old shack! Lots of things fall into place whilst the tension is ramped up as Leroy comes looking for the girl and the gold!

Jeb and Faith bond over nature and the arts

“Fact is, viewing the scenario from the wrong end of time’s telescope, The Grub-Stake bears a strong resemblance to a Soap Opera!” Nell Shipman

She was not wrong but the opera is well produced and the soap not so soft once the action kicks in and a battle begins culminating in that real-life cliff-hanger. Before that Shipman battles Alfred Allen in a no-holds barred scrap that she looked like she could easily win.

Location shooting on frozen Priest Lake - same spot as the image at the top!

The Grub-Stake is packed full of Shipman’s determination and charm but whilst it initially did well its distributor, American Releasing Corporation – who hadn’t even paid an advance – went broke. Other, better, offers came in too late after Nell had signed the deal – almost as green as Faith.

Nell again“…this picture was a real grub-stake gamble for a proprietor who must strike it, must pan out!”

Y'see Leo... you have to work with the bear; don't fight it!

Luckily British rights were secured – not that Nell saw any of the money – which ensured that the BFI ended up with the only extant copy. This was used by Idaho Film to create the From Lionhead Lodge DVD which is part three of their Nell Shipman Collection which comes complete with surviving shorts from the Little Dramas of the Big Places series and a short documentary narrated by Shipman’s grand-daughter and great grand-daughter in 1987 – the family creative spirit lives on. There’s also a suitably homely accompaniment from John Hayes and Eberle Umbach.

My Amazon Shipman shipment

The disc is available sporadically from Amazon (I may have grabbed the last copy!) whilst there also an excellent biography by Kay Armatage, The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, from which I gleaned so much interesting background and lifted the quotes above – also available from Amazon.

Watching and reading about Nell was another inspiration from Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema Edited by Melody Bridges & Cheryl Robson and available from Aurora MetroBooks. It features much on Nell including a fascinating and exciting chapter from film-maker Karen Day whose documentary on Nell I can’t wait to see in full!