Modern Times (1936)

Modern Times (1936) says goodbye to The Little Tramp and hello to a brave new world. Charlie Chaplin takes aim at the horrors of industrialism and the tribulations of the Great Depression, and yet he brings along a nostalgic zest for the earlier twentieth century that is not going gently into that good night.  Inevitably, he presents us with a Valentine.

Continuing our look this year at films from the 1930s that make a social commentary on that decade, as I’ve mentioned before, many filmmakers in this era chose to deliberately comment on social conditions in that challenging time and make “modern times” the backdrop of even silly comedies.  You didn’t have to look far to see a message.   We turn now to a giant (a little giant maybe, but still a giant) in the history of film who does just this, and uses it to give his most famous and beloved character not just a curtain call, but a socially relevant one.

Mr. Chaplin came to realize that The Little Tramp’s era of particular innocence was over, and practically speaking, there was no way to continue his adventures not speaking.  Therefore, this is the last “silent film” made featuring our hapless hero.  However, it is also the first film we hear Chaplin’s voice—later in the movie when he sings a silly song.

The film is mostly silent, with some sound effects and very little dialogue—mostly from the boss of the factory who bellows at his employees via a large television-type screen.  This is not your father’s industrial revolution; in fact, the factory where Chaplin works is almost Buck Rogers futuristic, an Art Deco version of a factory.  It is the 1930s, after all.

The movie starts with a stark title screen and a rather film noir-ish musical theme, threatening and foreboding.   We see the image of a flock of sheep, and then the image of men climbing subway steps in a herd, running to the factory, to suggest that they are sheep.  The title card tells us this is “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

Will humanity succeed in finding happiness?  Maybe only at times.

It doesn’t start well for The Little Tramp and quickly goes downhill from there.  We see him tightening nuts on an assembly line, having trouble keeping up.  The bellowing owner from his omniscient screen observes them and wants more speed.  He is played by Al Ernest Garcia.

Charlie takes a smoke break in the washroom, but he gets yelled at by the face on the screen even in there.  Big Brother is even in the bathroom.

Efficiency experts come to the factory to demonstrate a new machine that will make the workers eat lunch faster—and poor Charlie is chosen to demonstrate.  Strapped into a chair, a revolving, demonic lazy Susan is placed before him, and he is force-fed soup, corn on the cob, and gets the traditional slapstick pie in the face from a mechanical arm, while his face is blotted intermittently with a large office blotter.  It’s a funny skit, and levity helps us—if not Charlie—from going crazy at the imprisonment of his workplace. 

When Charlie is on a break or off the line, he continues to twitch with the motion of tightening nuts with two large wrenches.  Poor Charlie goes berserk from the stress, ends up being threaded through the giant cogs of a machine in the iconic scene.  Afterwards, he takes his large wrenches and attempts to tighten anything—including the large dress buttons strategically placed on the breasts of a passing woman.  This is one of those gags that’s more funny if we are led right up to the moment and then is suddenly cut off, because what we imagine could happen is always funnier.

Playfully and maniacally out of control, Charlie is chased by his co-workers, taken to a hospital, and later, cured of a nervous breakdown, and must start his life over.

He is constantly starting over from square one in this movie, and that, too, is a comment on the modern condition.  We must be prepared to start over.  Always.

In another funny mistake, he falls into a manhole and comes up with a red warning flag, such that construction workers would take on a job, and when he emerges from the manhole with the flag, just at that moment, a protest march by a communist workers’ group is going by and he gets swept up with them.  He is rounded up and taken to the police station. 

Meanwhile, Paulette Goddard plays a poor girl living in a shack by the waterfront with her widowed father and two kid sisters. She is The Gamin. Dad is out of work, heavily burdened by the Depression, and Paulette, with a scrappy survivor’s instinct, steals bananas to feed the family.  Reportedly, one of her little sisters was played by Gloria DeHaven at 10 or 11 years old in her first role.

Charlie is sent to prison, and when cocaine is smuggled to another prisoner via a salt shaker, referred to on our helpful title card as “nose powder,” Charlie inadvertently douses his food with it.  His wide-eyed reaction tells us he is high.  One wonders how that got by the Production Code.  Helpless to control himself, he accidentally foils a plot by revolting prisoners to overtake the guards, and he is rewarded with release.  He doesn’t really want to leave, though.  He is cozy in his cell, with no responsibilities and three squares a day.  It’s a good setup for a guy like Charlie, who loses every job he gets.  When he is freed, he is told, “Now make good.”

The Gamin, meanwhile, gets into trouble when her poor father is shot to death.  The authorities step in and take the two younger girls, but Paulette escapes.  She finally crosses paths with Charlie when he gets fired from a shipbuilding company on the waterfront where she lives, and he accidentally launches a half-built ship. She has stolen bread and runs smack into him.  Gentleman that he is, and out of work besides, he allows himself to be arrested and carted off to the hoosegow once again.  He offers his seat to Paulette in the police van and helps her to escape.  Even eating a big meal in a restaurant without the money to pay for it won’t keep him in jail for long, but when he meets Paulette, Charlie decides it’s better to stay out of jail, and he vows he will get a home for them both, “even if I have to work for it.”

They are two lost souls battling the storms of life, but The Little Tramp is a man-child, and their relationship is as playful as brother and sister.

He takes a job as a night watchman in a department store.  Again, as we’ve seen in this previous post on Employees' Entrance (1933), the multi-story downtown department store has a special place in the Great Depression.  It is the cathedral of commerce, with the promise of good times coming again, despite most people not having enough money to do more than window-shop.

Charlie provides a place for Paulette to sleep on home furnishings floor, and while she luxuriates in a comfortable floor model bed, he runs into a former co-worker from the factory that has now been shut down.  He is Big Bill, played by Stanley “Tiny” Sandford, and he is going to rob the store.  One of his accomplices explains, “We ain’t burglars—we’re hungry.”  

It ends, of course, with Charlie taken off to jail again, but before that we have that stunning scene where he tries out roller skates and nearly plumets to his death on a floor where renovation construction is not finished and he comes very close to falling several stories while cutting a caper with fancy skating moves.  Classic film fans may know this is just a very clever matte shot, and Chaplin was not in danger doing the stunt, but it looks terrific.

When Charlie is released from jail this time, Paulette faithfully waits for him, and provides a tumbledown shack for their home, and she has returned to stealing food. 

The factory where he worked at the beginning of the movie is reopening and he hopes to get a real home for them.  He is assigned as an assistant to a mechanic, played by Chester Conklin.  This time, Chester gets caught in the cogs and Charlie’s not much help.  Paulette, Charlie, and Chester would all reunite in The Great Dictator (1940).

Believe it or not, he has another stay in jail, while Paulette gets a job as a dancer in a café, and she gets him a job as a singing waiter there when he’s out of the lockup.  Here’s where we get to finally hear Charlie Chaplin’s voice.  He cannot remember the words to the song he’s supposed to sing, so he makes up gibberish and we see him dashing about the dancefloor, twisting himself into a frenetic ballet, and singing a song Chaplin wrote called, “Je cherche après titine,” which is a mixture of French and Italian that he roguishly performs as a supposedly risqué song. Have a look here.

But wouldn’t you know, life comes down hard again, and the authorities who have been looking for Paulette all this time have returned.  She and Charlie escape, but scrappy Paulette has finally run out of courage.  They stand on the dusty open road that stretches out miles ahead of them.  Is it promising, or is it bleak?  Perhaps it’s just a matter of viewpoint.

“What’s the use of trying?” she says in tears.

He answers, “Buck up—never say die.  We’ll get along!”  It is the theme of the Great Depression for those who survived it.  I can remember many years ago watching a documentary series on the Great Depression with my father, who was a teenager during those years, and who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help send money back to support his widowed mother and kid sisters.  At the time, it was an adventure.  Bad times were shrugged off because if they weren’t, you were done for just by giving up.  But as an old man, looking back, with perhaps less courage than he had when he was a teen, and having acquired a great deal more knowledge about life in the meantime, he muttered, stony-faced at the TV:  “My God, it’s a wonder we ever survived it.”

In the background, while Charlie is comforting Paulette, we hear the music he wrote, which would later gain lyrics and the title “Smile.”  The first to record it supposedly was Nat King Cole, many years later.  You can listen to it here.

There was no single anthem of that generation, but this quiet, hopeful song may have been one of them.

It was a perfect way, as Charlie and Paulette gather their things and walk down the road together to meet head-on whatever happens next, for The Little Tramp to leave us.  I like to think he’s still down the road somewhere, shrugging off mishaps.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Moving Picture Girls series

The advent of silent movies had a profound effect on society in just about every way one could imagine.  While we classic film fans are well familiar with by-products of the film industry in the form of memorabilia and fads, I recently came across a series of children’s books published during the Silent Era called The Moving Picture Girls.

I’ve been researching, for too many years that I care to count, a book I’m working on (off and on) about children’s chapter books written during World War II with the war as a background.  These include the Dave Dawson series, the Cherry Ames series, and many, many that are lesser knowns today that reflected the anxieties of the youth of that time and were intended to involve them in a world at war and to inspire them.  In the process, I stumbled upon this interesting series for girls of an earlier generation.

I would think the Moving Picture Girls series might have inspired a few girls to head for Hollywood in those early, heady days; for the most part, they were reflective of a new medium, a new industry, a new art form, and a new career for young women.

The author is Laura Lee Hope, which is actually a pseudonym for a team of writers, whose most famous series might have been The Bobbsey Twins. The seven original books in the series were published from 1914 to 1916.  These are the books in order:

The Moving Picture Girls
The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm
The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound
The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms
The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch
The Moving Picture Girls at Sea

The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays

In the first book, stage actor Hosmer DeVere struggles to find work and support his two teenage daughters, Ruth and Alice, when he has lost his voice and needs rest and medical treatment.  He accepts a job working in silent films, where he does not have to speak.  He accepts reluctantly, because, of course, he thinks the flickers are vulgar and beneath the stature of a stage actor. 

His daughters become involved in mysteries and hijinks traveling with him on location shoots through the series, and even become film actresses themselves.

Now in public domain, you can read these books through the Project Gutenberg website, or purchase in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, or you will probably find a few old copies on eBay, if your bent is collecting.  Have a look at this website for more descriptions of each book.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Big Business - 1929

Big Business (1929) is an unabashedly violent and vengeful look at the selling of Christmas trees.  But when Laurel and Hardy are the salesmen, you just don’t regret the absence of peace on earth and good will toward men.

This silent short, directed by James “J. Wesley” Horne, boasted two future greats as supervising director and cameraman – Leo McCarey and George Stevens.  The film was enrolled in the National Film Registry in 1992.

The title card begins the adventure telling us, tersely, that we are witnessing “selling Christmas trees in California.”  This would explain the lack of snow and the palm trees gliding by the little open car with the tiny truck bed on the back, into which are standing a few spindly Christmas trees mounted on wooden stands.  “Spindly” only according to today’s opulent standards (I have brought home real trees in years past which, when crammed into my living room, the single tree took up half the room. Small animals could have lived in its branches and never been discovered. Even getting the tree into the house and squeezing it through the door, some years, my twin brother and I in our younger days would have to grab it and run up the steps with a heave-ho as if we were storming a castle with a battering ram.)

The streets are wide, refreshingly free from the chaos of traffic, and the boys park among a row of Spanish-style stucco houses to peddle their trees door-to-door.

A customer declines.  Another customer hits Ollie on the head with a hammer.  The third customer, our old pal James Finlayson, proves to be the ultimate hard sale.  The shenanigans begin innocently enough:  Stan gets a tree branch caught in the door after Mr. Finlayson slams it on them.  It happens again.  He then gets his coat caught. Soon, the irritated homeowner and the frustrated salesmen devolve into a tit-for-tat battle of one-upmanship.  Finlayson attacks their tree, Ollie’s watch, and the boys start ripping pieces off Finlayson’s house.

The chaos builds, neighbors come to watch, as does a surprisingly laconic policeman, as the boys destroy Finlayson’s house, and Finlayson destroys their little truck. 

Released in April 1929, we may note two things: first, just as we discussed in this previous post, many Christmas-themed movies were not released at Christmastime; and second, perhaps because this movie was released well before the Wall Street Crash in October of that year, there is a bravado of commercialism and complete lack of sentiment.  The boys want to hustle their trees, but we are not given any indication that they are down and out.  As the melee concludes, though all three men appear tearful under the threat of the cop’s presence, they are not regretful for what they have done, only that they were caught. 

There is no Yuletide softening of the heart here as they would be in movies of later years, no message of reconciliation or discovering the true meaning of Christmas after their fits of destruction.  Stan and Ollie give Finlayson an exploding cigar, and then they run away from the cop.

Even modern Christmas comedies with more grit and sarcasm to them have an “aww-gee” moment, but not Laurel and Hardy in 1929.  Comedy was unapologetically brutal, and consequences were swift and severe.  And funny.

You can watch Big Business here from YouTube:

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Ben Model's Silent Comedy Watch Party

Go here to join Ben Model and his online house party for a special silent film screening - Sunday, March 15th at 3 pm EDT.  Have a look here at his blog for more info on his Silent Comedy Watch Party!

My Wife's Relations - 1922 - Fish for Friday

My Wife's Relations (1922), starring Buster Keaton, who also co-wrote the script and co-directed with Edward F. Cline, is a jubilant reminder of when comedy was not just king, but a rough-and-tumble jester in a world without political correctness but with a kind of egalitarian substitute -- the view that all of society was made up of fools and everyone deserved his chance to be made ridiculous.

The plot is simple, but the gags are elaborate.  Buster lives in a polyglot neighborhood, where, in a mistaken melee with a postman, a window gets broken in the office of a local magistrate/justice of the peace.  This judge happens to be an emigrant from Poland.  Moments before, he has been contacted by a young Polish couple wanting to be married and desiring to have the ceremony performed in their language.  He assures them that he can do the job, as he speaks no other language but Polish anyway.

Having set the gag thusly, a window in the magistrate's office gets smashed in the fight with the postman, and Buster runs away, knocking down a stout Irishwoman named Kate.  She is furious with him, and hauls him before the Polish magistrate intending to rat on him for breaking the window.  Of course, the judge thinks they are the couple who just phoned him wanting to be married, so he marries them.

I love how the title cards for his speech are written in Polish. Irish and Poles make up a good chunk of my ancestry, so the comic premise of this movie is especially dear to me.  My Polish grandmother, or Babci, never learned much English, and in her first days as an immigrant to America before World War I, she loved silent movies because she could understand them.  Even the title cards in English were irrelevant to her, so clear was the pantomime.  Marie Dressler was her favorite actress.

Poor Buster looks like a Liliputian among the giants, but he uses his wits to stay alive.

This brings us to one of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments, though it is probably too subtle for any viewer who does not really relate to the joke.  There is a moment when dinner is served and the family says a quick grace, then the men stab large chunks of beef with their ready forks and take all the meat before Buster can have any.  Buster is hungry and dejected...until he notices the date on the wall calendar.  It's Thursday.  Aha!

Buster goes over to the calendar, rips the page off, and demonstrates to the family greedily gobbling their beef that it is really FRIDAY!

They are Irish.  We next assume they are Catholic, because they choke and sputter in horror at committing a sin, and Kate, not so delicately, spits out the meat.

Kate is played by Kate Price, who performed in an astounding number of movies from 1910 to 1937, something like 300.  She was also a writer of silent film scripts.  I hope to learn more of her career.

Kate and her relatives ashamedly return the uneaten portions of beef back to the platter, and Buster, evidently not playing a Catholic in this movie, helps himself to a solitary feast.

Today, the observance of fasting from meat on Fridays by Catholics is reserved only for the Lenten season, but before Vatican II, this fish-for-Friday rule was all the time.  Indeed, in my home growing up we never stopped having fish on Friday and still do to this day, I suppose because we are just creatures of habit and we like fish.  Friday's as good as any day to eat it.

My favorite gag in the movie, however, is when they gather for a family portrait and the photographer's camera tripod slips to the floor, causing the family to slide down to the floor as well.  That is genius, and one of funniest scenes in any silent film.

But it is Buster's prank on the boorish family, using their religious observance as a level to gain parity with them, that clearly pokes fun at Catholics in a way that is pointed and shrewd without being caustic.  Films from the silent era are not so innocent as they are unselfconscious, which is their great strength and value.  This movie, made in 1922, was at the end of a long and boisterous era of mass immigration to this country where if not everyone got along, there was certainly an entertaining period of adjustment.  Later in that decade, the welcome mat got pulled in, immigration was restricted, and home-terrorist organizations like the KKK, long dedicated to the persecution of African Americans, added Catholics to their list of hated targets, as we discussed a few weeks ago in the intro to our series on films of the 1920s.

Come back next Thursday when we conclude the Lenten season on a less silly note and celebrate Easter and Passover with two versions of Ben Hur - from 1925 and 1959.

Have a look here at My Wife's Relations:

Marie Dressler

This is Marie Dressler.  You can see her sense of humor, the very devil in her eyes.  I don't know when the photo was taken, but it's another in a collection of photos in a book called Stars of the Photoplay, published in 1930.

She would have been 62 in 1930 (reportedly born in 1868), but the brief bio that accompanies the pic says she was born three years later in 1871.  If, as was a lady's privilege, she lied about her age, she probably did not bother to relate to the publisher that this was not a current picture.

Or perhaps the studio photographer's magic was just at work here.  I particularly love that all the photos in the book - big, page-sized portraits - are done in sepia tone.  I think of the Thirties more as sepia than as black-and-white, and I'm not sure why.  Perhaps all the sepia family photos, or the brown paper sleeves that held the 78 rpm records passed down to me, or the fact that my mother, in her Depression-era teens had a pair of saddle shoes that were brown and white, not black and white as in the 1950s.

Marie Dressler, who had a string of bad luck in middle age when stage parts dried up, was in financial difficulty when suddenly in 1927, a return to silent movies gave her career a lift and made her famous.  It was a glorious end to the Jazz Age for her (a decade which, earlier, she had lamented was youth-obsessed), and the Great Depression and the coming of talkies seemed no great threat to the likes of this enormously talented actress.  On the contrary, she could sling lines with the best of them.

But we were not long into the sepia decade when Dressler died in 1934.  Being a woman in her early sixties did not keep her from being a star, successful in an industry where that was unusual.  It took cancer to beat her.

I'm sorry I missed commenting on Miss Dressler when TCM programmed her movies in June when she was Star of the Month.  I've always felt a special affinity to Marie Dressler when my mother told me that my grandmother, who was an immigrant to this country and did not speak English, loved Miss Dressler.  She was my grandmother's favorite movie star.  She didn't need to understand English for silent films, when pantomime told the story very nicely, thank you. 

I wonder if she felt a sense of loss when her favorite movie star began to speak, and she couldn't understand her?  Was it almost as great a sense of loss as when she died?

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

"Cecilia Sisson" Skit

The recent excellent post at Self-Styled Siren on the myth about silent star John Gilbert's failure to make it in talkies because of his voice had me recalling some skits that capitalized on this theme.  Sid Caesar had a memorable bit in "Your Show of Shows".  Though some silent film actors did have difficulty adjusting to sound film, Gilbert wasn't one of them.  Comedy skits such as these may have perpetuated the myth in his particular case.

One of my favorite skits on this theme was done by Carol Channing, about the fictional star "Cecilia Sisson".  Cracks me up.  Have a look:

Enter the Screenwriter

An article printed in The Scientific American in June of 1909 heralded a new change in American popular culture. The screenwriter. This blurb was reprinted in the magazine in June 2009.

Moving pictures are exhibited in about ten thousand theaters and halls in the United States. With the rapid spread of this new amusement has also come a marked change in the public taste. Spectators were once quite content with a view of factory employees going to and from their work, the arrival and departure of railway trains, and similar scenes. Nowadays, a more or less coherent story must be unfolded, for which reason the makers of moving pictures have been compelled to write plays (or at least to conceive them) and to have them acted before the camera.

“More or less coherent” is a quality which seems to have remained with screenplays a century later.

The Grub-Stake (1923)

There is something irresistably modern about her. Watching her lithe, tall body run, and climb, and even fight, we might forget for a moment that she did these things a very long time ago. It is the silent movie, the sepia tint, the title cards, and the accompanying music that underscores the moods that remind us Nell Shipman was strictly Back in the Day. She could fit comfortably in the world today, except perhaps that she was a maverick who did not seem to aspire to fitting in.

Today we have a look at “The Grub-Stake” (1923), a silent film written, produced, and starring Nell Shipman. My copy comes courtesy of your friend and mine, John Hayes from Robert Frost’s Banjo. John and his wife, Eberle Umbach, wrote and performed the score for this 2006 restored version of Miss Shipman’s little known masterpiece.

Nell Shipman, who cut her teeth in vaudeville and traveling acting troupes, was a woman of intelligence, extraordinary creativity, and astonishing grit, who shook off the trappings (and shackles) of Hollywood to form her own production company when indie films, let alone indie films with a woman at the helm, were unusual. And she did her own stunts.

“The Grub-Stake, A Tale of the Klondike”, a long eight-reeler, takes our Nell, a kind-hearted but naïve girl, from a waterfront slum in the Pacific Northwest where she cares for her invalid father, The Skipper, played by Walt Whitman (no relation) as a laundress and bumbling Jill-of-all-Trades.

A sauve entrepreneur from Gold Rush country, played by Alfred Allen, comes down for supplies, and bestows upon her a “grub stake”, that is financial backing, to start herself up a laundry in the Klondike to serve what she hopes will be a busy clientele of gold prospectors in dirty clothes.

But oh, the tangled web of fate! This sauve fellow is a Wicked Man, who compromises her, marries her (though he is already married), and hies her away to the Alaskan mining town where he runs a dance hall.

He immediately puts his “wife” to work dancing with wealthy men. Nell, who has shucked her simple sailor dress for fancy duds, is shocked to learn from the crude saloon madam with the heart of gold, played by Lillian Leighton, that she has been lured here for unsavory activities, which indeed may lead to a Fate Worse than Death.

So to speak.

“Dumb as an oyster” her husband notes when he decides she is the perfect pigeon for his chicanery.

It takes her a little while longer to discover that her husband is also just about to have her poor old father murdered by his stereotyped sinister Chinese toady.

But, Nell, full of righteous indignation and a bucketload of terror, packs up The Skipper, a new friend who is the adle-pated saloon lush dragging an imaginary dog on a piece of rope, and heads for the hills in a dogsled (pulled by real dogs, not imaginary ones). In a snowstorm. Filmed on location in Idaho, we have real snow and ice, and real frostbite, as the “making of” documentary on this DVD can attest.

We are treated to several more reels of winter, in which Nells gets separated and wanders blindly in foul weather until she takes refuge in a bear’s den. The bear takes kindly to her, in fact, kisses her full on the mouth. There will be a love story, but not yet. Not with the bear. They’re just good friends, apperances notwithstanding. Oh sure, they sleep together, but you really should get your mind out of the gutter. It’s not like that.

Several weeks pass as winter turns to spring and some beautiful nature photography guides the story. Nell finds comfort among the critters of the woods, a sense of affection and peace as she had never felt in civilization. Nell Shipman kept her own zoo of critters for these wildlife scenes, and it has also been noted by film historians that she was an early proponent of humane treatment for animal actors.

But, trouble returns in the form of her evil husband, a rowdy gang of claim jumpers, a relentless Mountie, and her sprained ankle that just does not seem to want to heal. Fortunately for Nell, the saloon madam has a handsome artist son, played by Hugh Thompson, who also lives in the woods. Eventually, true loves conquers all (this time with the artist, who is almost as affectionate as the bear), but not before we get a final cliffhanger with Nell actually hanging off a cliff. Did I mention she does her own stunts?

Watching Nell Shipman is a treat, mainly because of that unusual unaffected quality of hers that seems to reasonate beyond the decades since the time this film was made. Where other female stars of her era were waif-like, she is big and athletic. Perhaps because she made the film herself, there is no turning her into a comic buffoon, which could easily happen in the studio system back down in Hollywood where “types” were plugged into the machine.

Miss Shipman defied the types of the day. Her shaggy, unruly bobbed haircut, and her wry, subtle expressions of humor alternating with utter innocence are an intriguing contrast to the typical exaggerated pantomime of the day. She moves with natural, unselfconsicous energy, unlike some of the more tableau-stances typical of actresses in silent films of the time. I would not say she is a better actress than someone like Lillian Gish or Greta Garbo, who were more studied and trained. She was not a better actress, but her very ease and naturalness are refreshing.

The use of a natural setting itself seems like a bold example of Nell Shipman’s escape from the Hollywood studio.

I especially enjoyed John’s and Eberle’s score for this restored film, which follows the moods and conscience of the characters, and especially of the real woman at the helm. It must have been a fascinating process, interpreting not only the dramatic moods of the film as vingettes in music, but to try to relate the emotional and psychological regeneration of the Nell's character when she encounters nature.  In a sense, a musical score written for a silent film is rather like another script for the entire plot.

Can’t get enough plunking on a toy piano, for my money. For more on their participation in this, and in another of Nell Shipman’s films, have a look at John’s description here, and also here. John also gives a good bit of background on Miss Shipman’s career.

“The Grub-Stake” is third in a three-volume DVD series of Shipman’s films available at the Boise State University bookstore. Here’s a link to get your copy. Extras on this particular DVD include an interesting documentary on the making of “The Grub-Stake”, and another brief bio narrated by Nell Shipman’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

When “The Grub-Stake” was released, it received initial praise and brief success, until the distributing company suddenly failed and went out of business. This pulled the plug on Nell Shipman’s silent film career. It took many decades and the efforts of determined people like Tom Trusky of the Idaho Film Commission, research and restoration staff, including the likes of John and Eberle, to revive her masterpiece and share it with us.

My thanks to all of them for their efforts, and especially to John for sending me this very special DVD.