Something New (F. A. Croghan Presents a Nell Shipman Production, Essex Motor Company, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Also last night (Sunday, July 20) Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” was doing a double bill of Buster Keaton’s comedy masterpiece Seven Chances with an oddball entry from 1920 called Something New. I figured my husband Charles and I could strategically change the channel at the right moment and get to see Something New, which was an interesting product of actress Nell Shipman and her life partner (then), Bert Van Tuyle. Nell Shipman was a minor star in the early silent days who was best known for playing feisty, independent-minded pioneer women. She was born Helen Foster-Barham and got the name “Shipman” from her first husband, whom she broke up with in 1920, the year this film was made. In 1925 she married Charles Ayres, whom she divorced in 1934, and was single for the rest of her life until her death in 1971 at age 77. The imdb.com “Biography” page on Shipman lists Van Tuyle as her second husband, between the other two, but gives no dates for their marriage – which makes me wonder if they were just living (and working) together and weren’t legally wed. Something New casts Nell Shipman as a frustrated writer who needs new experiences to give her prose works some character and power. Her full name isn’t given in the film, though apparently her last name is “Bickley” because she’s single and her father Sid Bickley (L. M. Wells) appears as an on-screen character. In search of new experiences, Miss Bickley takes the stage (not horse-drawn but motorized, this being 1920) from San Diego to Tijuana (and one amusing thing about this movie is the primitive state of the border crossing in 1920 versus the militarized zone it is now and will be even more so if Führer Trump has his way and builds his “big, beautiful wall”) to see her dad, who owns an enterprise called the Blue Lotus Mine.

Along the way she meets Bill Baxter (Bert van Tuyle), who falls in love with her at first sight. Unfortunately, the Blue Lotus mine has been taken over by a gang of at least 20 Mexican bandidos led by Agrilla Gorgez (William McCormack). The name “Agrilla Gorgez” is silly enough for a Mexican (or any other human being, for that matter), but it gets worse when we see the sheer amount of goop plastered on his face in a futile attempt to make him look “Mexican.” It’s not clear just what Gorgez and his bandit gang have in mind to do with the Blue Lotus once they’ve taken it over, though we guess they’re going to eliminate Sid Bickley and take the mine over themselves. What is clear is that once Our Nell shows up, they’re overjoyed at seeing a woman on the premises and desperately want to gang-rape her, though Gorgez insists on going first before any of his men can have their wicked ways with her. Fortunately, Bill Baxter owns a Maxwell car, and though the path to the Blue Lotus mine is supposedly impassable to anything other than a human or a horse, in a series of extended but singularly dull scenes Bill manages to drive his car along a series of rocks and bits of other seemingly impassable terrain. According to a postlude from “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, this film was actually bankrolled by Essex Motors, makers of the Maxwell, to show how tough their car was and essentially market it as an all-terrain vehicle. Ultimately Bill rescues Nell from the bandidos and tries to take her back to civilization, but the bandits ride off in hot pursuit and, since there are about 20 of them and only two of the good guys (though Nell has previously shown an uncanny ability to pick off and kill any bandit she shoots at), they’ll clearly be done for unless Our Heroes can think of something to stop them. After Bill starts nodding off at the wheel of the Maxwell, Nell takes over and continues their escape while I was wondering, “How do they keep the car running? And where do they get gas?” (Charles said a lot of early motorists drove around with jerry-cans of gas to refuel, but we’re never shown Bill and Nell stopping to refuel even if they had their own gas supplies with them.)

The something that finally stops the bandit gang is a precariously perched mountain boulder, which Bill tells Nell to keep backing into until it falls, whereupon it starts an avalanche that buries those ol’ debbil bandits the way Pharoah’s army was drowned in the Red Sea. Now I realized why Jacqueline Stewart had double-billed this rather strange movie with Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, with its famous avalanche scene at the end cooked up by Keaton and his assistant, Clyde Bruckman, after preview audiences disliked the film’s original ending and only laughed when Keaton tripped over three rocks. Keaton figured that if they laughed at him being chased by three rocks, they’d find it screamingly funny if he were chased by a whole bunch of rocks, most of which were fakes made of papier-maché (as were a few of the ones in Something New as well). Something New was a pretty strange movie, and the background score on TCM’s print – played by an outfit from Chicago – just made it worse. Whoever composed this had the dumb idea of backing this 1920 action-adventure film with music that sounded like 1960’s avant-garde jazz, complete with blaring saxophones and loads of free-form percussion. The score screamed “Anachronism” from the first note and almost never got any better, though at least they didn’t have anyone singing the way they did with the equally awful score they came up with for Helen Gardner’s Cleopatra (1912). Frankly, I wish they had shown the Milestone Film and Video release from 2007, with an uncredited piano score and (courtesy of a print found at UCLA) the original color tints, which were missing here.