Canadian Women Film Directors Database
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Quote:
"The Yukon Film Society has transformed The Grub-Stake into The Grub-Stake Revisited by editing its running time, setting it to a new score, and adding narration comprised of passages from Shakespeare. I was fortunate enough to see the picture with a live orchestra and actors in the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa. [...] While the setting was right, the substitution of Shakespeare for the original title cards gives the proceeding an ironic air not at all intended by the original film-makers. A modern audience cannot help but feel distanced from a century-old film using dialogue from unrelated plays written 400 years ago. Inviting a twenty-first-century audience to laugh at characters and situations, rather than trying to understand them on their own terms, makes it even harder to get that audience to see past the silent film style of acting. It also feels as if this is breaking faith with Nell Shipman. She put everything she had professionally, emotionally, and financially into making The Grub-Stake as an earnest picture in which we are meant to feel the heroine's fear and to rejoice in her triumph."
-- Robin MacKay


Source:
MacKay, Robin. "Nell Shipman: One Woman in Her Time Plays Many Parts." Queen's Quarterly 124, no. 3 (2017). (p. 360)