Discovery of a Long-Lost Film

This week’s highlights at the UCLA Film Archives’ Festival of Preservation include TV science documentaries by Frank Capra, newly refurbished classics by Frank Borzage, Michael Powell and David Lean--and a major discovery of a work by a woman filmmaker, until now all but lost to film history.

This last movie, showing tonight at Melnitz Theater ((213) 206-FILM) is “The Grub Stake”--a 1923 feature starring, produced, written and co-directed by a little-known Canadian, Nell Shipman. An independent film by a woman filmmaker, made outside the studio system, “The Grub Stake” would be historically interesting in any case. Amazingly, this nearly 70-year-old movie is a rousing entertainment, antiquated and predictable, but charmingly so.

It’s a full-blooded Alaskan Gold Rush melodrama, “Way Down East”-style, with a wronged heroine (Shipman), hair-breadth chases and rescues, deep-dyed villainy and a terrific last-minute (literal) cliffhanger. Even more fascinating are the movie’s feminist slant--male lust and brutality undone by a community of women, artists, oldsters--and Shipman’s and co-director Bert van Tuyle’s strong feel for natural settings and wildlife. Shipping a menagerie of 70 tame animals to Idaho, Shipman creates an idealized little “peaceable kingdom” for her heroine, with an amiable brown she-bear as her major sister-in-struggle.

“The Grub Stake” proves that Shipman should be much more than the smudged footnote on movie history she is at present. Showing with it is a film that should be a smudged footnote: a 1929 UFA tragic romance, “The Wonderful Lie”--about doomed love among the military elite. Primarily notable for the youthful presence of Brigitte (“Metropolis”) Helm and Franz (Francis) Lederer, it demonstrates how much a Max Ophuls, rather than “Lie’s” Hanns Schwartz, could bring to material like this.

Borzage’s 1948 “Moonrise” (Friday)--about murder, love and moonlit pursuit in the swamps--has long since been enshrined as a B-movie classic; UCLA’s print is notable for its lyrical recapturing of the romantic, studio-lit film noirish swamp with which Borzage surrounded lovers Dane Clark and Gail Russell. The 1946 “I’ve Always Loved You”--also from ultra-romantic pacifist Borzage’s most maladjusted decade--is an “Intermezzo”-style romance, newly restored to its original Technicolor version, with key performances dubbed by Artur Rubinstein.