Vintage Film Festival - The Grubstake

The Grubstake - (1922)

Cast

	Faith Diggs	Nell Shipman
	"Skipper" Diggs	Walt Whitman
	Mark Leroy	Alfred Allen
	Dawson Kate	Lillian Leighton
	Michael Murry	George Berrell
	Jeb, Kate's son	Hugh Thompson
	The Mountie	C. K. Van Auker
	Leroy's Chinese servant	Ah Wing
	Brownie, the Bear	Brownie

Director: Nell Shipman

Synopsis

In The Grub-Stake, Shipman plays Faith Diggs, a beautiful young woman who supports herself and her ailing father by taking in laundry and modelling for artists. Enter the villian Leroy who agrees to back her plan to open a laundry in gold rush country.

Once in the Klondike, Faith discovers Leroy's true and dastardly schemes. Faith flees with her father in a dogsled and gets hopelessly lost. A series of Shipman's trademark animal and wilderness scenes ensue before Faith is rescued in what Shipman described as a 'sockeroo finish.'

Review

"One of Shipman's best, a fine feminist actioner"
By: mgmax from Chicago

Report from Cinesation 2006: THE GRUB-STAKE (****) This 1923 Nell Shipman production is a rip-snorting action movie with enough plot for two or three ordinary Shipmans, happily with print quality that did full justice to its Alaskan photography.

At first it's a bit dismaying to see feminist role model Shipman trying to protect her virginity from a rotter who lured her to Alaska to become a dance hall girl-- virginity is for other silent actresses to worry about, Nell Shipman should be worrying about grizzly bears and rockslides.

But soon she's got her invalid father lashed to the dogsled and she's off looking for gold, taking time out along the way to curse God face to face and to frolic amid nature's larger mammals (at which point God is let off for good behavior) before a two-fisted finale with a literal cliffhanger. This picture had everything but the Johnstown Flood in it, and accompanist Ben Model's playing gave it everything he had too. The only pity is that some of the titles were noticeably jittery-- an easily remedied glitch that really shouldn't even have been let out of a major national archive for a show like this.