Red Riding Hood (1901 film)  Red Riding Hood was a 1901 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, based on Charles Perrault's version of the story "Little Red Riding Hood". In a bakery in the French countryside, Father Latourte, his wife, and their staff are busy with customers, pastries, and baked goods of all kinds. The Latourtes' young daughter, called Red Riding Hood, reads by the firelight until her parents leave for a moment. She starts to play boisterously, getting the bakery staff mixed up in hijinks and pratfalls. Her father and mother return, chagrined by her escapades, and she is told to take a pot of butter and a galette to her grandmother's cottage. Red Riding Hood travels through the forest on her errand, meeting a wolf, who finds out where she is going. Encountering her friends from the village school, she happily pauses her journey to play and dance with them. Meanwhile, at a windmill near the cottage, the miller Sans-Souci has comic trouble with his mule. The wolf arrives at the cottage, has a spirited fight with the grandmother, swallows her, puts on her clothes, and waits in her bed. Red Riding Hood arrives, and in silent-film pantomime the famous dialogue ("Goodness, what big eyes you have!", "The better to see you with", etc.) takes place. The wolf is about to pounce on Red Riding Hood when the staff of the bakery, in search of the missing child, bursts into the cottage. Pandemonium breaks out as the wolf is chased all around the cottage and finally, with a shatter of glass, out a closed window. The bakers follow him through the forest, with country folk joining in the chase as it goes on. As the wolf crosses a bridge over a rocky gorge and a torrent, he is shot by a "garde champêtre". The wolf has an over-the-top death scene, somersaulting and tumbling, until the bridge breaks and sends him into the torrent. The wolf's body is pulled out of the river and carried off on a stretcher. In the village square, a fête is in progress. Red Riding Hood's rescue procession comes back just in time to watch the great parade of village worthies, peasants, and schoolchildren through the square. The wolf's body is ceremoniously put on a spit and roasted.