Rescued in Mid-Air

Help! Help! A young woman has been caught in a bicycle accident, and thrown clear to the top of the church steeple, where she is clinging desperately! Will no one save her?

Yes, my child. You may rely on Professor Whitebeard. In his new flying machine with flappy wings and propellers, he will rush to her aid!

This imaginative and delightful little scientific romance (as scifi was called in those days) is the product of Percy Stow, who did a lot of interesting movies in the first decade of the 20th Century, including the earliest known version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND and Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST which combined film grammars purposefully.

The explosive consequences of a traffic accident hurl a young woman into the sky where she depends helplessly from her parasol (looking much like Disney's Mary Poppins decades later). She manages to grab hold of the tip of a tall steeple where she awaits rescue by a crazy-looking inventor in his marvelous flying contraption. The film may be the first to depict an 'ornithopter' (an aircraft that flies by flapping wings) and the special effects, which involved a full-size model of the machine (complete with spinning propellers and flapping wings) and superimposed images of the machine in flight are quite good (for the era). The film is also an early example of 'cross cutting' as the scenes switch between the flying rescue and the spectators watching the event from below. The copy I watched on-line was a bit choppy and I am unclear on who fell through the roof (and why). A fun relic directed by Percy Stow, who three years earlier had directed the first version of the classic fantasy "Alice in Wonderland".