The Ridiculousness of Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest
Note: This is the fiftieth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fifth favorite 1908 film, RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST, directed by J. Searle Dawley.
For as enjoyable as I find a lot of the movies this early on my favorite films list, they are obviously products of their time, and have to be viewed as such. Even considering the limitations of their time, very few films created by 1908 hold my rapt attention, and of course, among those that do are featured in these essays. So let it be said that RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST (1908), while it comes in at my final favorite of the year, is not exactly masterpiece material, clearly even among its contemporaries. Its strength lies on a few intriguing shots and a general, pervasive feeling of early silent melodramatic ridiculousness.
RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST was an Edison picture, directed by the company newcomer J. Searle Dawley. Co-directorial credit is also often given to Edwin S. Porter, but considering Porter had hired Dawley just one year earlier, he likely just supervised Dawley’s production. That may have resulted in a lot of overlap in what we now associate with the “director” role, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s say Dawley was the director.
Dawley was one of Edison’s pioneers out west in Hollywood in 1910, and joined the Paramount predecessor Famous Players in 1912 just after Porter did. Dawley will show up a few more times on this list for his work on films much better than RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST. For an early effort from a fledgling filmmaker working through the birth of an art form, however, the movie provides some thrills.
The film is also notable in that it’s one of pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s two existing film roles as an actor. He plays the father of the baby that is abducted by the titular eagle. But the star of the show is said eagle, a weird mechanical contraption that flaps with the convincing air of a…well, a mechanical eagle built for a 1908 film.
At the beginning of the film, it swoops down upon a clifftop cabin, outside of which a baby sits. It picks up the baby and begins taking it to its nest. The mother picks up the rifle to shoot the eagle and/or her baby out of the sky then realizes that’s a terrible idea.
Then, we’re treated to the best shot of the movie: a close up of the fake eagle carrying the very real baby over the well-rendered painterly backdrop of a countryside. It’s simple, and not visually incredible even compared to other contemporaries with flight scenes, but it’s such a ridiculous shot that makes you consider the the relatively amateur air film productions had this early in their existence. The rest of the film is pretty unspectacular; the logging crew the father works on scramble to save the baby once the mother tells them the news, which takes up most of the film’s approximately six-minute run time.
The film’s next best moment, after the eagle abduction close up, is when a man (I believe it’s D.W. Griffith’s father character?) is lowered down to the eagle’s nest to save the baby. The eagle isn’t home, but not for long, and the human-on-avian battle that ensues carries a physicality that would be at home in a film from any of the three geniuses of silent comedy. The man ultimately wins and flings the eagle about so angrily it brought out an unexpected hoot of laughter of me. And then the family lives happily ever after.
RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST represents the kind of pulpy adventure stories that would come to the fore in the written word and films of the 1910s and ’20s, but its limitations and sparse moments of truly interesting moments ground it very squarely in 1908. It’s not exactly an important innovation in that genre, filmic or otherwise, but it is indicative of the action-packed melodrama Hollywood would begin churning out relatively soon. In the meantime, Dawley produced a couple mildly striking images among RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST’s six minutes, and would improve on this ratio a few years later as he helped craft Hollywood, geographically and culturally.
Make sure to catch up on and keep up with all of my essays on my favorite films here.
