A Fool's Revenge (1909) Online

I saw this film in October 1998 at the Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, Italy. They screened a print from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The print ran 16 minutes at 16fps (I timed it), but was missing its original intertitles, so the original running time would have been at least two minutes longer.

This is of course the Victor Hugo story that provided the basis for Verdi's opera "Rigoletto". IMDb's synopsis for 'A Fool's Revenge' seems to be based on the Verdi opera, not on this short film itself. Necessarily, this brief silent movie omits all the music and most of the plot from Verdi's opera, but there are other differences less mandatory, which director D.W. Griffith (or his producer) seems to have chosen out of concern for the sensitivities of his American audience. I'll cite just a handful of the differences here: In Hugo's original play and Verdi's opera, the Duke sends his henchmen to abduct the Countess so that he can seduce her, but they accidentally abduct Gilda (the jester's daughter) instead. The Duke therefore seduces Gilda. In Griffith's film, the Duke intentionally tasks his men to abduct Gilda so that (get this, please) she can cure his melancholy! When she arrives, he merely gazes upon her beauty (so that's all he wanted, then) and then he releases her.

There are other divergences, but that should give you the general idea. Somebody at Mutoscope (Griffith himself?) clearly intended to bowdlerise this story, quite apart from condensing it into such a short running time.

Grand opera was popular in American cities in the 1900s, so I can't help wondering why Griffith gave this film a generic title rather than calling it 'Rigoletto': the film isn't even "A Court Jester's Revenge", mind you, but "A Fool's Revenge", which sounds as if this is going to be a modern-day slapstick comedy about an idiot, instead of a mediaeval European melodrama. Opera has always been less popular in the rural U.S. than in metropolitan areas, and perhaps Griffith was more concerned with the sensibilities of his fellow rural Southerners than with more sophisticated "Yankees".

I was intrigued to spot the comically moon-faced Fred Mace among Griffith's troupe here, as one of the courtiers. My rating for this movie is 7 out of 10.

This 17 minute film was adapted from Victor Hugo's 'LeRoi s'amuse' and Verdi's opera, 'Rigoletto'. Obviously Griffith had 'Les Miserables' and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' in mind when he was adapting this film, but it just goes to show that the reason why he got better as a director was because he was adapting existing pieces of work onto the screen.