Rescued by Rover
Encyclopedia
Rescued by Rover is a 1905
British short
silent
drama film
, directed by Cecil Hepworth
, about a dog who leads its master to his kidnapped baby, which was the first to feature the Hepworth's family dog
Blair in a starring role; following the release, the dog became a household name and he is considered to be the first dog film star. The film, which according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "marks a key stage in the medium's development from an amusing novelty to the seventh art," and, "possibly the only point in film history when British cinema unquestionably led the world," was an advance in filming techniques, editing, production and story telling.
Four hundred prints were sold, so many that the negatives wore out twice, requiring the film to be re-shot each time. Two professional actors were paid to appear, and the film is cited as the first film to have used paid actors. The style of shooting and editing would bridge the gap between the styles of directors Edwin Stanton Porter and D. W. Griffith
, and prints have been preserved in both the United States
and the United Kingdom
.
playing with a child in front of a fireplace
. Later that day, the baby is taken out in a pram
by her nurse. The nurse refuses to aid a beggar
woman, and is then distracted upon meeting a soldier. While talking to the soldier, she pays no attention to the baby, and the beggar woman approaches from behind and snatches the sleeping child.
In the next scene, the nurse confesses to the mother that the child has been lost. Rover, also sitting in the room, listens before jumping through the window and racing down the street, going around a corner and across a river. The dog makes its way to a slum
and barges through each and every door; he finds the right one and enters. In an attic, the beggar woman is removing the clothing from the child; the dog enters and is driven off by the beggar.
The dog leaves the house and swims back across the river, down the street and into its master
and mistress's
home. In a study, the child's father is sitting; Rover enters and pleads with him to follow. They leave, with the man following the dog across the river in a boat to the slums. They enter the room where the child is hidden, and the father quickly takes the child from the beggar woman and leaves with the dog. Upon their return home, the child is placed in the arms of the mother, while Rover prances happily around them.
as the soldier, and his wife as the old woman who stole the baby. The two actors were paid half a guinea
each; Hepworth would recall "We couldn't get them for less". The film is often cited as the first film to have used paid actors. Completing the cast was Mabel Clark, who had previously played Alice in Hepworth's version of Alice in Wonderland
, as the child's nurse. Clark was also the cutting room assistant.
The movie was so successful that Hepworth had to re-shoot the entire film twice. The first two negatives wore out in meeting the demand for prints.
's first major fiction film. Some four hundred prints were sold at a price of £8 each, and they circulated for at least four or five years. The character of Rover the dog, played by Hepworth's family dog Blair, would become a household name and is considered the world's first canine film star. This first appearance of a dog in a narrative based film would cause the uncommon name of Rover to become popular for dogs.
.
It gave rise to a number of other chase films centred on animals, including Lewin Fitzhamon's later film Dumb Sagacity. Rescued by Rover has parallels with D. W. Griffith
's debut film The Adventures of Dollie
(1908).
Rescued by Rover contains more than twenty shots, an advance compared to Hepworth's film five years before, How it Feels to be Run Over which contains a single shot. This not only made the film longer, but demonstrated that advances in film language could be made in editing as well as shooting. The editing in Rescued by Rover included time contractions, so that Rover's journeys would take considerably less time on film than they did in reality.
In linking these shots together, Hepworth attempted to avoid the confusion of earlier multi-shot films such as The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter. Three shots are used to set up the plot, that of the baby being stolen by a beggar woman, then the following sixteen shots show Rover tracking down the child. These sixteen are then repeated in reverse as the dog returns home, and then played again for a third time when it brings the father with him. A fourth repetition is spared by showing a shot of the kidnapper returning to her room, followed by a shot of the reunited family. The film shows a growing understanding about how stories can be told on film. It is assumed that the audience does not need to see the father, baby and dog return to the family home, but that they would assume that this occurred while the beggar woman was returning to her hovel. While the duration of that shot does not relate to the time required to travel back, it also did not affect the sense of logical representation on screen.
The film was not only a forerunner in the terms of editing, but improvements that modern viewers would find relatively minor were noted in their day. For instance, in the attic scenes, Hepworth's use of arc light
s was celebrated for being an early use of harsh lighting conditions to create ambiance and indicate a dangerous world. Prints have been saved both in the Library of Congress
film archive, and the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute
.
1905 in film
The year 1905 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*Pathé Frères colors black-and-white films by machine.*Filmmaking takes an unexpected historical role by recording activities along Market Street, in the year preceding the destruction from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906...
British short
Short subject
A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...
silent
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
drama film
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
, directed by Cecil Hepworth
Cecil Hepworth
Cecil Milton Hepworth was an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He was among the founders of the British film industry and continued making films into the 1920s....
, about a dog who leads its master to his kidnapped baby, which was the first to feature the Hepworth's family dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...
Blair in a starring role; following the release, the dog became a household name and he is considered to be the first dog film star. The film, which according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "marks a key stage in the medium's development from an amusing novelty to the seventh art," and, "possibly the only point in film history when British cinema unquestionably led the world," was an advance in filming techniques, editing, production and story telling.
Four hundred prints were sold, so many that the negatives wore out twice, requiring the film to be re-shot each time. Two professional actors were paid to appear, and the film is cited as the first film to have used paid actors. The style of shooting and editing would bridge the gap between the styles of directors Edwin Stanton Porter and D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
, and prints have been preserved in both the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
Plot
The film opens with Rover, a collieCollie
The collie is a distinctive type of herding dog, including many related landraces and formal breeds. It originates in Scotland and Northern England. It is a medium-sized, fairly lightly built dog with a pointed snout, and many types have a distinctive white pattern over the shoulders. Collies...
playing with a child in front of a fireplace
Fireplace
A fireplace is an architectural structure to contain a fire for heating and, especially historically, for cooking. A fire is contained in a firebox or firepit; a chimney or other flue allows gas and particulate exhaust to escape...
. Later that day, the baby is taken out in a pram
Baby transport
Baby transport consists of devices for transporting and carrying infants. A "child carrier" or "baby carrier" is a device used to carry an infant or small child on the body of an adult...
by her nurse. The nurse refuses to aid a beggar
Begging
Begging is to entreat earnestly, implore, or supplicate. It often occurs for the purpose of securing a material benefit, generally for a gift, donation or charitable donation...
woman, and is then distracted upon meeting a soldier. While talking to the soldier, she pays no attention to the baby, and the beggar woman approaches from behind and snatches the sleeping child.
In the next scene, the nurse confesses to the mother that the child has been lost. Rover, also sitting in the room, listens before jumping through the window and racing down the street, going around a corner and across a river. The dog makes its way to a slum
Slum
A slum, as defined by United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the...
and barges through each and every door; he finds the right one and enters. In an attic, the beggar woman is removing the clothing from the child; the dog enters and is driven off by the beggar.
The dog leaves the house and swims back across the river, down the street and into its master
Master (form of address)
Master is an archaic masculine title or form of address in English.- In English and Welsh society :Master was used in England for men of some rank, especially "free masters" of a trade guild and by any manual worker or servant employee to his employer , but also generally by those lower in status...
and mistress's
Mistress (form of address)
Mistress is an old form of address for a woman. It implies "lady of the house", especially a woman who is head of a household.An example is Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. The title did not necessarily distinguish between married and unmarried women.The title Mrs. is...
home. In a study, the child's father is sitting; Rover enters and pleads with him to follow. They leave, with the man following the dog across the river in a boat to the slums. They enter the room where the child is hidden, and the father quickly takes the child from the beggar woman and leaves with the dog. Upon their return home, the child is placed in the arms of the mother, while Rover prances happily around them.
Production
Rescued by Rover was predominantly a family affair — Cecil Hepworth's wife, Margaret, wrote the scenario and played the role of the mother on screen. Hepworth himself directed, painted the scenery and acted as the father. Their child was the baby on screen, and the part of Rover was played by the family dog, Blair. Two professional actors were paid to appear, Sebastian SmithSebastian Smith
Sebastian Smith was a British stage and film actor.-Filmography:* Rescued by Rover * Prehistoric Peeps * The Tramp's Dream * The Blue Carbuncle...
as the soldier, and his wife as the old woman who stole the baby. The two actors were paid half a guinea
Guinea (British coin)
The guinea is a coin that was minted in the Kingdom of England and later in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1663 and 1813...
each; Hepworth would recall "We couldn't get them for less". The film is often cited as the first film to have used paid actors. Completing the cast was Mabel Clark, who had previously played Alice in Hepworth's version of Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland (1903 film)
Alice in Wonderland is a 1903 British silent film directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow. It is the first movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland....
, as the child's nurse. Clark was also the cutting room assistant.
The movie was so successful that Hepworth had to re-shoot the entire film twice. The first two negatives wore out in meeting the demand for prints.
Release
Rescued by Rover is often considered to be the United KingdomUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
's first major fiction film. Some four hundred prints were sold at a price of £8 each, and they circulated for at least four or five years. The character of Rover the dog, played by Hepworth's family dog Blair, would become a household name and is considered the world's first canine film star. This first appearance of a dog in a narrative based film would cause the uncommon name of Rover to become popular for dogs.
Legacy
Previous films by Hepworth and his company had been considered a continuation of the cinema of attractions. This was the period in early film where film makers would place more emphasis on the image and the ability to show something than a narrative story. For the first time in Rescued by Rover an attempt at a narrative rather than simple spectacle was made, and was also considered a step forward in both film grammar and structure. It is considered to be a little corny to contemporary audiences, although the format will be familiar to fans of LassieLassie
Lassie is a fictional collie dog character created by Eric Knight in a short story expanded to novel length called Lassie Come-Home. Published in 1940, the novel was filmed by MGM in 1943 as Lassie Come Home with a dog named Pal playing Lassie. Pal then appeared with the stage name "Lassie" in six...
.
It gave rise to a number of other chase films centred on animals, including Lewin Fitzhamon's later film Dumb Sagacity. Rescued by Rover has parallels with D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
's debut film The Adventures of Dollie
The Adventures of Dollie
The Adventures of Dollie is a 1908 film directed by D. W. Griffith. It was Griffith's debut film as a director. A print of the film survives in the Library of Congress film archive. The film tells the story of a young girl who, after being kidnapped by a gypsy pedlar, ends up trapped in a barrel...
(1908).
Rescued by Rover contains more than twenty shots, an advance compared to Hepworth's film five years before, How it Feels to be Run Over which contains a single shot. This not only made the film longer, but demonstrated that advances in film language could be made in editing as well as shooting. The editing in Rescued by Rover included time contractions, so that Rover's journeys would take considerably less time on film than they did in reality.
In linking these shots together, Hepworth attempted to avoid the confusion of earlier multi-shot films such as The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter. Three shots are used to set up the plot, that of the baby being stolen by a beggar woman, then the following sixteen shots show Rover tracking down the child. These sixteen are then repeated in reverse as the dog returns home, and then played again for a third time when it brings the father with him. A fourth repetition is spared by showing a shot of the kidnapper returning to her room, followed by a shot of the reunited family. The film shows a growing understanding about how stories can be told on film. It is assumed that the audience does not need to see the father, baby and dog return to the family home, but that they would assume that this occurred while the beggar woman was returning to her hovel. While the duration of that shot does not relate to the time required to travel back, it also did not affect the sense of logical representation on screen.
The film was not only a forerunner in the terms of editing, but improvements that modern viewers would find relatively minor were noted in their day. For instance, in the attic scenes, Hepworth's use of arc light
Arc Light
Arc Light is the debut novel by Eric L. Harry, a techno-thriller about limited nuclear war published in 1994 and written in 1991-2.As China and Russia clash in Siberia in June 1999, nuclear missiles strike the United States. The U.S. retaliates against Russia, and World War III begins...
s was celebrated for being an early use of harsh lighting conditions to create ambiance and indicate a dangerous world. Prints have been saved both in the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
film archive, and the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
.
External links
- Rescued by Rover in .avi format, hosted by HepworthFilm.org
- Rescued by Rover on YouTube