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 Back to God’s Country
March 7, 2019

By Kay Armatage

From the earliest days of cinema and throughout the thirties, forties and fties, the Canadian wilderness
was seen as an exotic paradise – “God’s country.” As opposed to the mean streets of New York or
Chicago, the western frontier or Death Valley, Canada was represented as a land of forests and lakes,
sunshine and snow. The phrase “the great white north” was used in an intertitle in Back to God’s Country,
and has remained a popular signi er of the Canadian landscape to this day.

Before coming back to her native Canada to make Back to God’s Country in 1919, Nell Shipman had
already starred in adaptations of novels by James Oliver Curwood, a minor author of wilderness
adventure stories. God’s Country and the Woman (d. Rollin S. Sturges; Vitagraph; 1916; lost) established
Shipman as the “girl from God’s country,” snowshoeing and dogsledding across the frozen North in
mukluks and parkas. In addition to the location settings of the lms, montages and tableaux exhibiting
wild animals were Shipman’s trademark as star. Such moments of inter-species harmony are central to
Shipman’s work, like the dance numbers in Fred Astaire musicals. In her autobiographical novel,
Abandoned Trails (1932), she notes that “a picture lacking Brownie [the bear] in a leading part would
invite failure.”
Back to God’s Country (d. David M. Hartford, Canadian Photoplays Production, 1919) was based on
Curwood’s short story “Wapi the Walrus,” a study of a Great Dane dog and how he responded to the
needs of the woman he loved. Shipman’s screenplay shifted the main character from the dog to the
woman and emphasized her rapport with animals of all kinds. The lm includes the most excessive of all
Shipman’s displays of human/animal communication. In an early scene, Dolores (played by Shipman)
lolls about in erotic play with Brownie the bear, nuzzling his snout and tweaking his ears, as skunks,
squirrels, raccoons and baby foxes cavort about her.

Shipman’s casual, playful relations with animals attest simultaneously to her essentialist femininity and
to her heroism. It is in Dolores’ relation with the dog that the connection between patriarchal de nitions
of femininity are aligned most transparently with bravery and heroism. In one of the most a ecting
scenes in the lm, Dolores’ femininity and her courage are marked by her actions and underscored by the
intertitles. Seeking help for her wounded husband at the Trading Post, Dolores meets Wapi (played by
brother masti s Tresore and Rex) for the rst time. Just as she arrives, the dog’s owner Blake takes a
whip to Wapi for ghting viciously with other dogs. Without hesitation, Dolores ings herself between the
whip and the abused dog. The daring rescue is underlined by Blake’s warning “Look out! That dog is a
devil…” (intertitle). But as he speaks, the killer dog miraculously quietens, as the intertitle – equivalent to
Shipman’s voice as writer/enunciator – comments “A new miracle of understanding, roused by the touch
of a woman’s hand.”

Is the Nude Rude?

The representation of the woman protagonist emphasizes not only her intuitive communication with
animals and nature, but includes a sensual pleasure in her own body. As character and star, Shipman
do s the fetters of decorum to cavort not only in nature, but au naturel. In the famous nude scene,
Dolores is bathing in a mountain pool as the villains leer at her through the bushes and hatch their
dastardly plan. In the rst take, Shipman wore a modest esh-coloured wool bathing suit. However,
when she saw the wet thick wool wrinkle around her body, she shed the suit and directed the
cinematographer so that the mise en scène would invite no prurience while still making her unadorned
body amply evident.
The movie was advertised with posters featuring a drawing of Shipman pulling a shawl across her
evidently naked body as she stood knee-deep in water. In the trade papers, the promotion was even
more explicit, featuring a sketch of a naked female body arching lyrically on tip-toe, with this advice to
exhibitors: “Don’t Book ‘Back to God’s Country’ unless You want to prove that the Nude is NOT Rude.”[i]
The interpenetration of the lm with the promotion and advertising strategies invites not only a
provocative challenge to contemporary mores about the display of women’s bodies, but also ascribes a
forthrightness, fearlessness, and creative control to Shipman herself as screenwriter and star.

Race and Difference

From a contemporary perspective, Back to God’s Country is marred by the everyday racism of her era.
Terms such as “esquimaux”, “half-breed” and “Yellow Man” (for a Chinese immigrant) rankle shockingly.
Yet this was common parlance of the period, as we see also in D.W. Gri th’s Broken Blossoms (1919).
The long prologue setting out Wapi’s genealogy is crucial in this regard. A Chinese immigrant wanders
into a frontier bar with his companion, the magni cent masti Tao. In a scene of racist brutality, the
“Yellow Man” is murdered by white frontiersmen and Tao is captured and abused. Wapi, the killer dog, is
Tao’s psychically deformed descendant several dog generations later.

Shipman distances herself rmly from the murderers at the outset of the lm, and the marks of that
di erence are not only gender but also attitudes towards race. Though we may criticize the Orientalism
of the treatment of the Chinese man – the feminization of him as ultra-sensitive and vulnerable –
nevertheless through the high moral tone of the prologue and intertitles, Shipman aligns herself as
screenwriter and character with a progressive anti-racism that sets her apart from the low-life ru ans.

Relations with the Indigenous inhabitants of the terrain are also relevant to this issue. In the only scene
in the lm in which Dolores connects with another woman, the sailors on the ship docked at the Post
have brought some “eskimaux guests” on board. The ironic quotation marks of the intertitle underscore
the sailors’ racism and sexism.

Ideological discrepancies abound in this scene. For one thing, the Indigenous women are played for
comedy as they marvel at the modern invention, the phonograph, and chomp on bars of Fels Naptha
soap. However, Dolores lashes out in protest and attempts to rescue an Inuk woman from the rapacious
louts. She struggles valiantly, but sisterhood is not powerful enough and both women are overcome.
Although she is ine ectual in her attempt to save the Inuit women, it is in these scenes that Shipman’s
patriarchally de ned femininity slips from the bonds of mere historical curiosity and conveys an anti-
racist and proto-feminist heroism that reaches out of the past into current feminist discussions.
Hysteria at the Climax

The climax of the lm depends upon a two-step relay of hysterical and heroic forms of femininity. Dolores
is mushing across the arctic landscape with her injured husband laid out in the sled while the villain
pursues them with his own dog team. During the chase, for no earthly reason, Dolores drops her revolver
and leaves it behind. At that moment, the audience always groans. That groan signals a recognition of
the melodramatic pressures upon the woman protagonist to be vulnerable, even incompetent. And we
groan again only a few seconds later when the invalid husband brie y rouses himself to say “Dolores,
give me the gun” (intertitle). In close-up, Dolores hangs her head in shame.
As the chase continues, an intertitle indicates that Wapi’s “hour of destiny is at hand.” Close-ups of Wapi
are intercut with shots of Dolores worrying and the villain approaching in this low-speed chase by dog-
sled – a scene rivaled in its quintessential Canadianess only by the canoe chase in Joyce Wieland’s The
Far Shore (1975). As Wapi runs o to attack the villain’s sled dogs, an intertitle intones: “Fighting at last
the greatest of all his ghts – for a Woman.” While the conventions of an action climax demand the
woman’s vulnerability, it is due to her intrinsic qualities as a woman – including her helplessness – that
she can command the obedience of this heretofore-untamable beast.
Leaving God’s Country

The lm grossed 300% over production costs, although Shipman saw precious little of that money. By the
end of production, all partnerships were o . Nell’s marriage to Ernest Shipman ended and her exclusive
contract with Curwood to adapt and star in his vehicles dissolved. We can only guess that Shipman and
Curwood, both in their forties in relation to Nell’s luscious twenty-seven, were devastated by her agrant
a air with the dashing production manager, with whom she began the next episode of her life. She
retained control of the zoo of wild animals, including the masti s and Brownie the bear, and continued to
make movies until she went bankrupt in 1924.
Back to God’s Country emerges from a moment in cinema history that was characterized by technical
innovation, the germination of genres, and maverick entrepreneurship. It comes also from the period of
progressive optimism just after the First World War, in which the shift to industrial capitalism and an
urban consumer economy brought new progressive social values including jobs and votes for women.
Shipman’s proto-feminism, consciously articulated anti-racism, animal-rights activism and Canadian
chauvinism are complex and contradictory, revealing a struggle to come to terms with the values of this
new world.

[i] The Moving Picture World, July 24, 1920, 42.

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