Rescued From An Eagle's Nest (1908)

Rescued from an Eagle's Nest
Director: J. Searle Dawley
USA 1908
6 min


Plot:
A father (a young D. W. Griffith!) and a mother (credited as Miss Earle) lives in a cabin on a mountain. The father sets off to work with a lunch box, and the mother walks into the cabin again, leaving their little infant (Jinnie Frazer) outside. We thereafter see a clip of men cutting down a tree.
Suddenly a black eagle appears, grabbing a-hold of the baby and flies away. The mother sees what is happening, fetches her hat and runs off to find her husband. The parents and all the lumberjacks set off to find the eagle's nest, which they find half-way down the wall of a cliff.
A woodsman (Henry B. Walthall) is lowered down to the nest with a rope. He has an intense fight with the eagle, which he at last manages to kill with a stick. He grabs the baby, and the other man pulls them up to safety.




This is an amazing little silent short, made in the birth of the cinema at the Edison Studios. The scene were the eagle flies off with the baby is one of the first immortal pictures in cinema history.

The intertitles of this YouTube clip are different from the information on IMDb, but I depend on the latter one and used that information.

See the film here: