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More moving silence
Mar. 7th, 2008 08:45 amI first heard of Nell Shipman when I went to an award ceremony at Benaroya Hall with Tami, who had won a Nell Shipman Award for Excellence in Filmmaking for her sound work on a local movie. This was before I had gotten so deeply interested in film and film history, and I didn't register much about Nell Shipman's history except that she had been some kind of figure in early film days. Well, I've now watched two of her movies, Back to God's Country (1919) and Something New (1920), and I have a better sense of who she was.
She was born in Vancouver, BC, but seems to have shot many of her films in Idaho. Her first big success was God's Country and the Woman in 1916. What's remarkable to modern eyes is that she produced, wrote, directed, and starred in her own films. In fact, the teens and early twenties seem to have allowed a lot more freedom to women in the film industry than the intervening decades before second-wave feminism. At the same time, based on the evidence of these two films, she was still writing women-in-peril stories. In both these movies, she is threatened with rape and is semi-dependent on men to save her honor, although she also actively fends for herself and actually has to protect wounded men as well.
Both movies are adventure stories set in rugged territory (shot on location) with protracted chase scenes and gun fights. They both feature animals prominently, although Back to God's Country moreso. Shipman apparently kept her own menagerie which she donated to a zoo when her career tanked in the mid-'20s, and Back to God's Country features bears and raccoons and a porcupine as well as a trusty dog. There's a bit of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie in the plots, and in fact the dog in Something New is called Laddie. Laddie delivers a message to the male lead that Shipman is in trouble at the old mine.
Something New becomes a long, grueling (and ultimately kind of tiresome) chase across a supposedly Mexican landscape (probably actually Idaho), with a car (something new!) being chased by horses. All the driving stunts were done by Shipman and her fellow actors, and there are some remarkable feats that approach the level of driving the car down cliffsides. It seems impossible that a car of that vintage could actually survive the punishment it takes, and it made my back ache just watching them jounce over the boulders. Shipman also wields a gun ... and a typewriter.
This basic, hardy adventure story-telling is all well and good, but after 57 minutes of watching a car jounce over hill and dale, I needed something more artistic, so I popped Flesh and the Devil (1926) into the player. This is a Garbo and Gilbert film directed by the enigmatic Clarence Brown, who was a protege of the great pictorialist, Maurice Tourneur. And Flesh and the Devil is an utterly gorgeous movie pictorially, with the full splendor of MGM's production machine on display in the monumental sets. The story is utter best seller tripe about boyhood chums and femmes fatales and infidelity and duels amongst the aristocracy, but it is magnificent tripe, like Gone with the Wind. I didn't make it all the way to the crazy ending this time, because the hour grew late and my eyes grew tired, but boy was I ensorcelled. Still, perhaps it needed Nell Shipman to crash into the scene in her car and punch John Gilbert in the jaw and sweep Garbo off her feet. Gilbert becomes the trusty dog, Laddie. Yes, Back to the Devil's Country, or Something Flesh. After all, Garbo was a thespian, you know.
She was born in Vancouver, BC, but seems to have shot many of her films in Idaho. Her first big success was God's Country and the Woman in 1916. What's remarkable to modern eyes is that she produced, wrote, directed, and starred in her own films. In fact, the teens and early twenties seem to have allowed a lot more freedom to women in the film industry than the intervening decades before second-wave feminism. At the same time, based on the evidence of these two films, she was still writing women-in-peril stories. In both these movies, she is threatened with rape and is semi-dependent on men to save her honor, although she also actively fends for herself and actually has to protect wounded men as well.
Both movies are adventure stories set in rugged territory (shot on location) with protracted chase scenes and gun fights. They both feature animals prominently, although Back to God's Country moreso. Shipman apparently kept her own menagerie which she donated to a zoo when her career tanked in the mid-'20s, and Back to God's Country features bears and raccoons and a porcupine as well as a trusty dog. There's a bit of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie in the plots, and in fact the dog in Something New is called Laddie. Laddie delivers a message to the male lead that Shipman is in trouble at the old mine.
Something New becomes a long, grueling (and ultimately kind of tiresome) chase across a supposedly Mexican landscape (probably actually Idaho), with a car (something new!) being chased by horses. All the driving stunts were done by Shipman and her fellow actors, and there are some remarkable feats that approach the level of driving the car down cliffsides. It seems impossible that a car of that vintage could actually survive the punishment it takes, and it made my back ache just watching them jounce over the boulders. Shipman also wields a gun ... and a typewriter.
This basic, hardy adventure story-telling is all well and good, but after 57 minutes of watching a car jounce over hill and dale, I needed something more artistic, so I popped Flesh and the Devil (1926) into the player. This is a Garbo and Gilbert film directed by the enigmatic Clarence Brown, who was a protege of the great pictorialist, Maurice Tourneur. And Flesh and the Devil is an utterly gorgeous movie pictorially, with the full splendor of MGM's production machine on display in the monumental sets. The story is utter best seller tripe about boyhood chums and femmes fatales and infidelity and duels amongst the aristocracy, but it is magnificent tripe, like Gone with the Wind. I didn't make it all the way to the crazy ending this time, because the hour grew late and my eyes grew tired, but boy was I ensorcelled. Still, perhaps it needed Nell Shipman to crash into the scene in her car and punch John Gilbert in the jaw and sweep Garbo off her feet. Gilbert becomes the trusty dog, Laddie. Yes, Back to the Devil's Country, or Something Flesh. After all, Garbo was a thespian, you know.
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