The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs

The action takes place in the Middle Ages. On a market place, among a crowd of showmen, soldiers, countrymen, ladies and gentlemen, two adventurers are cutting the well-filled pockets of the onlookers. The crowd heads towards the hut of a magician who proves his skill by making a boy disappear. Then he puts a superb white hen into a lottery. The crowd fights over the numbers, the wheel turns and the lucky winner take the bird away.

In a barnyard, a peasant woman is taking care of the farm. Her husband comes back from the city and triumphantly shows her the hen that he himself places it carefully in the henhouse. The woman enters the henhouse to examine the white hen's nest where she finds a gigantic golden egg. She quickly tells her husband about her strange discovery. In the henhouse, the white hen, who is actually a fairy, jumps to the ground and turns into a person. At a sign from her, the other hens turn into women. Then the henhouse changes into a magnificent palace where the personified hens perform a graceful ballet until a huge basket of golden eggs appears. The henhouse suddenly returns to its original form and the dancers become hens again when the farmer and his wife return. They look at the huge, shiny eggs in amazement. The farmer breaks one of them and gold is dripping from it. The two peasants make a bountiful harvest of the magic eggs and go out to count their wealth. In the barnyard the two adventurers seen in the first scene enter and snatch a rabbit. The two peasants come out of the henhouse and while the woman jealously clutches her gold, the peasant threatens the thieves, who bow out and leave, but not without noticing the golden eggs.

The two peasants have become immensely rich and live in a sumptuous palace. A magnificent cage is installed in honour of the benefactor hen. Before going to bed, they admire it and stroke it. During the night, the two adventurers enter by climbing the balcony. They see the mysterious cage, discover the eggs and break one of them. The evil genie that was hiding there emerges in the form of a bat. Overcoming their fear, they examine another egg and see through the shell the sardonic head of Satan, spitting gold. They throw away the bewitched egg, which disappears in a cloud of smoke. At this moment they hear the peasant coming back and hide behind two armours. The master of the house opens a secret trap door and enters the underground cellar. He plunges his hands avidly into the accumulated gold and visions appear to him. On the wall, huge eyes roll menacingly in their sockets and gigantic hands seem to want to take away his property. Finally, the visions disappear and the peasant returns to his room. The two thieves come out of their hiding place, and steal the treasure. At dawn, the farmer and his wife recoil in horror when they see the door of the underground open and the gold gone. The farmer runs to the cage but no egg has been laid. He arms himself with a cutlass and, despite his wife's urging, goes to a small room in the castle to kill the hen.

As he hesitates to kill it, Satan appears and convinces him. Once the hen is dead, th peasant searches the entrails of the animal where he finds only one last egg. He violently throws the egg against the ground to break it and the fairy Misery appears. She tears his clothes to shreds and chases him away. The scene changes to the palace of the hen that lays the golden eggs. The peasant rises in a fairy tale setting, where, among gigantic eggs, fantastic roosters spread their wings. He is chased away by the fairy hen and by the others fairies who emerge from the enchanted eggs. The gold fairy appears, unfurling her cloak, from which gold flows everywhere.^[2]

The film was directed by Gaston Velle on a scenario, inspired by Jean de La Fontaine's eponymous fable, by Segundo de Chomón,^[3] who was also responsible for the cinematography.^[4] It was released in December 1905 in France, Denmark and United States. On 4 February 1906, the Journal d'Indre et Loire wrote: "La Poule aux œufs d'or (The Hen with the Golden Eggs), the magnificence of which particularly amazed the public as much by the interest of the scenario as by the ingenuity of a staging that the best engineered and most modern theatres would not disavow."^[5]