The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs (French: La poule aux œufs d'or), also known as The Hen with the Golden Eggs, is a 1905 French silent trick film directed by Gaston Velle.

On a market place, among a crowd of showmen, soldiers, countrymen, ladies and gentlemen, two adventurers are cutting the well-filled pockets of the onlookers.

The crowd heads towards the hut of a magician who proves his skill by making a boy disappear.

The crowd fights over the numbers, the wheel turns and the lucky winner take the bird away.

Her husband comes back from the city and triumphantly shows her the hen that he himself places it carefully in the henhouse.

The woman enters the henhouse to examine the white hen's nest where she finds a gigantic golden egg.

In the henhouse, the white hen, who is actually a fairy, jumps to the ground and turns into a person.

Then the henhouse changes into a magnificent palace where the personified hens perform a graceful ballet until a huge basket of golden eggs appears.

The two peasants make a bountiful harvest of the magic eggs and go out to count their wealth.

Overcoming their fear, they examine another egg and see through the shell the sardonic head of Satan, spitting gold.

The master of the house opens a secret trap door and enters the underground cellar.

On the wall, huge eyes roll menacingly in their sockets and gigantic hands seem to want to take away his property.

At dawn, the farmer and his wife recoil in horror when they see the door of the underground open and the gold gone.

He arms himself with a cutlass and, despite his wife's urging, goes to a small room in the castle to kill the hen.

Once the hen is dead, th peasant searches the entrails of the animal where he finds only one last egg.

He violently throws the egg against the ground to break it and the fairy Misery appears.

The peasant rises in a fairy tale setting, where, among gigantic eggs, fantastic roosters spread their wings.

On 4 February 1906, the Journal d'Indre et Loire wrote: "La Poule aux œufs d'or (The Hen with the Golden Eggs), the magnificence of which particularly amazed the public as much by the interest of the scenario as by the ingenuity of a staging that the best engineered and most modern theatres would not disavow.

The stage set is replaced by a magical landscape where the girls dance and large pile of golden eggs appear.

Stage set representing a room in a palace with two suits of armour on each side of a French window and the hen in a golden cage to the right.

The two thieves enter through the French window and find a golden egg under the hen.

Close-up of the egg with, appearing in double exposure, the head of the devil, spitting coins and rolling his eyes.

The farmer comes down some stairs to the right and breaks the egg open, revealing the coins inside.

He grabs a cutlass and the hen and despite his wife's protests, exits through the French window.