User Reviews

The fairy queen delivers each her just rewards: the good shepherdess gets to see pretty women dance with garlands and to wed a handsome prince. The evil princess gets trapped by crocodiles and dragons and men in black leotards dance around her. And serve them right too! Unhappily, this late effort is almost all stage presentation. By now the rest of the industry was moving past Melies.

This is one of the many previously lost or infrequently seen Melies pictures that have been made available by Serge Bromberg, David Shepherd and a myriad of other hands in the newly issued DVD set GEORGES MELIES: FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA. Required viewing for anyone interested in the history of movies ..... and a lot of fun.

A pretty shepherdess is attacked by a jealous princess. The princess has incredible anger issues and doesn't seem to be very happy. Her servants bring her everything she could want and she throws tantrums, abusing them and knocking the things they brought all over the place. Then we get divine? intervention. A Cinderella-like fairy godmother comes to the rescue of the poor shepherdess. She shows her a bunch of ballet dancer who fill up about half the film. Finally we get to the denouement. This could have been much more fun with a little forethought. By the way, that princess could have played linebacker for the Packers.

"The Good Shepherdess and the Evil Princess" is an amazingly dark fairy tale from Georges Méliès. And, in many ways, it's like the story of Cinderella....just darker and more shocking!

When the story begins, the nice shepherdess is hanging out with princess' nice son. But when the princess realizes he's hanging out with 'riffraff', she goes slap-happy and begins pummeling the poor lady! But apparently the princess is into slapping folks around, as when he returns to the castle, she spends her time slapping her servants, courtiers...well, everyone!!

Soon the fairy godmother arrives to the poor shepherdess and all sorts of weirdness occurs. Like too many of his films, all sorts of dancing girls appear and begin dancing about for no conceivable reason whatsoever!! After a whole lot of filler and nonsense, the fairy godmother appears to the princess. Instead of being in awe, the princess is her usual nasty self and the godmother exacts retribution....and it is BAD!!! See the film and see what I mean.

This is a complicated story for Georges Méliès...with many set and costume changes, a complex story...and even live sheep! It's obvious he pulled out all the stops (hence my relatively high score) BUT there also is quite a bit of silly nonsense and the story is awfully dark and nasty...hence the score isn't higher.

"The Good Shepherdess and the Evil Princess" is very similar to the Cinderella story, which Méliès explicitly adapted in a couple of his other surviving films. One, from 1899, was from early in his oeuvre and was one of the world's first multi-scene story films. The other, from 1912, was an ambitious film and one of his last that he made while working for his former rival Pathé.

This version was made in 1908, which seems to have been a turning point of a year for Méliès's Star Film Company. By now, he had two studios in Montreuil and was cranking out more nitrate than in any other year of his career. Besides trying to supply exhibition markets in France, he was also exporting these films to the United States. His brother ran operations in New York, where he would join Edison's Trust, with its high requirements of enough production per week to supply the booming Nickelodeon business. This seemingly thriving situation, however, proved to be Méliès's downfall. Reportedly, his brother was keeping American profits to himself, which in addition to monopolization by Edison's Trust in the U.S. and Pathé in Europe, led to Méliès ceasing production during 1909. His studio never recovered from this, and he eventually reneged on a contract making films for Pathé and retired from making movies.

Méliès's films from this time are uneven, and "The Good Shepherdess and the Evil Princess", in particular, seems rather directionless. Its six tableaux are haphazardly connected by the Cinderella theme. A fairy magically reverses the fortunes of the good shepherdess and the fat, evil princess without much in the way of plot.

This is one of the great French filmmaker's last fairy stories (since the audiences at the time were tired of Melies' theater style) and one of Melies' last films in 1908. It's basically a moral story more than anything else. A princess, who is a complete jerk and psychopath, doesn't want her son associating with a poor shepherdess, so she separates them every chance she gets. However, a good fairy then takes the side of the shepherdess and gets rid of the princess for good so they can marry.

I personally find it overlong at 13 minutes. One of the reasons is because the scene in the shepherdess's hut is really drawn out too much. The real magic come at the ending, where Melies brings in all his cut outs and fantastic creatures. It is as stagy as could be wished for, but so long as you're used to Melies's fantasy style this is worth seeing.