The Dumb Girl of Portici has been long overdue for recognition as one of pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber's finest creations and a landmark in women's cinema. The blockbuster film was Universal's most expensive to date and featured an enormous cast, large-scale sets, and an ambitious story. For Weber, The Dumb Girl of Portici represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with the incomparable prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova. Pavlova was appearing with the Boston Opera Company in D. F. E. Auber's 1829 La Muette de Portici, portraying Fenella, a wordless fisher-girl living during the Spanish occupation of Naples in the mid-17th century, who is seduced and abandoned by a Spanish nobleman. In the opera and in Weber's stirring drama, the betrayal of Fenella and the oppression of her people inspire her brother to foment a revolution