This short film was long considered lost, but a restored version recently received its 'World Premiere' screening at a festival of Mary Pickford movies at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY. Originally released in December of 1911, Little Red Riding Hood may have marked the first occasion when the adult Mary played a child. Miss Pickford was all of 19 years old at the time, although properly attired she could pass for half that.
Seeing the movie again today is a dismaying experience, sorry to say, for despite the best efforts of the restoration team this film is in very rough shape: severe nitrate decomposition is apparent in perhaps 50% of the footage, and I don't mean discreet scratches and blotches at the corners of the frame, I mean the kind of image distortion that blots out most of the picture and makes it hard to discern what is happening. Enough of the film survives to enable us to follow the story -- already quite familiar, needless to say -- but it's a challenge to catch the details.
In the opening sequence Riding Hood is seen with her family in an appropriately rustic setting. We watch as Granny is installed in her own home nearby. And then, of course, it's time for the little girl to visit her with a basketful of food and supplies. She becomes sleepy en route and lies down to take a nap, so it's suggested that everything which follows is a dream. The encounter with the "wolf" is a highlight because in this rendition Riding Hood meets not a man in a wolf costume but a trained dog, and the scene is inescapably comic because the dog simply doesn't look the least bit threatening. He appears to be quite friendly, but for the purposes of the plot we pretend that he's giving Riding Hood a hard time. Then he races ahead, and dashes into Granny's home. (Mercifully, we're spared the sight of Granny getting devoured.) When Riding Hood arrives the dog is reclining in the bed, a sight that got a big laugh at the festival screening I attended, and there was another laugh as Miss Pickford pantomimed the familiar "What big eyes you have!" routine.
However, the film's final moments were garbled, and I believe this may have been due to a restoration error: it seemed obvious to several of us at the screening that the surviving fragments of the finale were reassembled in the wrong order. As the restored version stands now, Riding Hood wakes from her dream, the wolf is gone, and she finds herself safe and surrounded by her loving family. But then, eerily, we see her father killing the wolf and her Granny's "spirit" rising from the wolf's corpse as Riding Hood looks on in horror. The End. Unless I'm very much mistaken, that shot of the wolf's killing and the grandmother's ascension to Heaven should have been the last portion of Riding Hood's dream, to be followed by her awakening and her happy realization that she was only dreaming, there was no wolf, and Granny is alive and well. But in the version we saw, Riding Hood wakes to find that it was all true! In any case, what survives of Mary Pickford's Little Red Riding Hood will be of considerable interest to silent film buffs, and we can be grateful that it exists in any form at all, but in its current condition the film is as a sad testament to the miserable neglect suffered by so many motion pictures from the earliest days of cinema.
