User Reviews

When Roy Watson comes visiting their wheat farm in the middle of the Indian jungle, he kisses Betty Hart in greeting. Her husband, Tom Santschi, objects and the men start fighting. Betty will have none of this, so she hitches up the ox-cart and takes the baby into the jungle, which is infested with lions and leopards. She and the baby lie down and take a nap.

That's the set-up as it appears in this Selig Polyscope two-reeler and you can watch it on the Eye Institute site on Youtube if you like. You may very well enjoy it, because the big cats are the point of this film and they are pretty good. This was no accident. Selig collected his menagerie early on and by the end of the decade, when he gave up on making films, he still rented his animals to other film-makers. He would later try to set up a paying zoo, but that didn't work out.

A fine two-reel feature picture in which three or four lions are used with far more than usual effectiveness. It really needs a sound- effect growler, which will make it a hair- raising offering. The Selig people were the pioneers in this peculiar kind of picture, and we are glad to say that they have distanced all competitors and even gone ahead of their own former work. A point has been reached where the animals appear in the jungle background of the picture and also come out into the foreground, where the action of the story depends upon them, with absolutely convincing naturalness. The effect is startlingly realistic. The story is simple and not melodramatic. A young pioneer and his wife live with their little girl in the jungle. There is a misunderstanding and the woman, with her child, starts off across the jungle to her mother's. They are in a bullock cart: but. at night, are attacked by lions; we see three big ones. The husband, who with a friend, the innocent cause of the misunderstanding, follows, rescues them. It is a big picture, a sure feature that will please every audience. - The Moving Picture World, November 16, 1912