User Reviews

This Pathe short is fairly well-made for the era, but it is an incredibly sentimental tearjerker that definitely hasn't stood the test of time.

The film opens in the one-room shack of an ill woman lying on a mattress on the floor. Beside her sits her small daughter who, when she realises that it is Mother's Day, decides to cheer up her sick mother by picking some wild flowers for her. Big mistake. While she's happily collecting flowers in the long grass, a hunter mistakes her for, well, something shoot-able, which he promptly does, fatally wounding the little girl. After being carried home by the man and some neighbours, the girl just has time to hand the flowers to her mother before dying.

I guess most of the audience would have had no clue what the film was about when they started watching it, so it probably had quite good shock value back in 1906, but today it just looks like the kind of film that is ripe for lampooning.

The cute daughter of a poor mother goes out dressed in a sack to pick pretty weeds for her mother. As she bends down in a declivity, a hunter aims at a bird in a tree well above and beyond her, but the bullet hits the girl and kills her instantly. So it's up to the hunter and his ghillies to deliver the flowers and the news she won't have the trouble of taking care of a child anymore in this bizarre Lucien Nonguet short.

I have no idea who came up with this idea, since it is strikes me as extreme even for today's anti-gun environment. I suppose someone came up with the idea of making something as sad as possible and by the time everyone had sobered up, it was in the can and they figured they might as well try to recoup some of the production expense.

Nonguet was one of Pathe's utility director of short subjects. He could turn his hand to almost anything, of course, and directed a few Max Linder comedies in the early 1910s. He seems to have been the director of choice for religious subjects. He was born in 1869 and joined Pathe in 1902 after working on the stage. He retired from movie production in 1920 and became a theater operator. He died in 1955.