Max, Mon Amour
OK, so 7 YEARS BAD LUCK is an American film, but its writer-director-producer-star is Max Linder, who’s as French as you can get. He’s as French as the two men pushing a piano across a zebra crossing we saw yesterday. And they were very French.
Actually, having enjoyed the film hugely, I find I’d rather sample images than say too much about it…
Of course it introduces a version of the Mirror Scene, later borrowed by Leo McCarey for Charley Chase and then the Marx Brothers. The estimable David Kalat points out, in a DVD extra in the box set Becoming Charley Chase, that Chaplin did the first known screen version of two identical characters meeting and one thinking the other might be his reflection… then Charley Chase directed a Billy West short in which that shameless Chaplin imitator repeated the gag. But Linder’s is the first to use an actual empty mirror frame to provide real justification for the confusion.
Max sees his end approaching.
Frizotto the dog pays the price for jeopardising Max’s romantic plans.
The film starts out slow and purposeful, taking its time to milk the mirror gag for suspense (even though nothing’s really at stake in this version, you still bate your breath waiting for a slip-up by Max’s doppelganger) — then it goes hell for leather into a variety of loosely connected sequences, mainly revolving around Max trying to ride a train without a ticket. It’s not a masterpiece of structure by any means, and a chase into a zoo is thrown in to provide some kind of spurious climax… I’m glad of it, though, because it leads to some delirious images and gags –
Max, inexplicably, has no fear of lions, and lions love Max, so he gets into their cage to escape his pursuers (les cops). One intrepid flic dons medieval armour to go after Max, but by the time he’s inside the cage, our hero has slipped away. More chasing, and a brief cutaway to the cop’s armour lying empty on the floor of the lion cage. He’s been eaten!!?
“I’m just crazy about the back of your neck.”
There’s also a hair-raising moment of Max striking a match on his lioness friend’s ear. Now, the ears of all cats are very sensitive, and lions have a way of letting you know they’re annoyed — Harold Lloyd nearly lost another set of fingers that way shooting THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK.
Every Which Way…
Max is delightful — it’s really hard to process the fact that he and his wife committed suicide just five years later.
It’s standard to say that Max’s high comedy elegance influenced Chaplin, whose masterstroke was to give that dapper quality to a homeless street scoundrel. And Max’s influence also lives on in the wonderful Pierre Etaix, right down to the gap-toothed smile. But when you come down to it, Max is just Max, a one-off, and an original.
Below: Max and manservant; Charley and James Finlayson; Groucho and Harpo and Chico.
February 24, 2012 at 2:46 pm
I was just watching some of Linder’s earliest shorts; his first director, Louis Gasnier, also directed Louis Jouvet’s first screen appearance in Topaze, though I don’t think Gasnier’s work is the best showcase for either performer. Admittedly, though, the early Pathé shorts are hardly intended to be ambitious films in comic terms — they mostly seem to be records of clever pratfalls rather than fully worked-out films.
February 24, 2012 at 3:02 pm
Louis Gasnier directed a marvellous film in 1925 called PARISIAN LOVE. It stars Clara Bow, who spends most of the film disguised as a boy. I think he was also the co-director of George Cukor’s first film, a 1930 Kay Francis vehicle called THE VIRTUOUS SIN – but I may well have got that wrong.
February 24, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Shock news…the lovely Lina Romay (aka. Mrs Jess Franco) has just died!
RIP!!
February 24, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Yes Max is another great artist The Artist RIPS-OFF!!!!!!
February 24, 2012 at 5:11 pm
David W., I think that there are good things in the Gasnier filmography, but I just didn’t feel that either Linder or Jouvet was used to maximum impact in the works I’ve seen. There are some very amusing transitions and juxtapositions in his film with Jouvet, though they’re not related to performance for the most part. I see some resourceful soul has posted Parisian Love to Youtube. Gasnier has a truly extraordinary filmography, from Max Linder through the Perils of Pauline, back to Europe and then 1930s exploitation in the form of Reefer Madness. One can only imagine what Linder could have done with that material.
February 24, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Gasnier’s early sound films are hard to find, and only recently I found a source for some. Was The Virtuous Sin Cukor’s first or second film? I know he had co-directors for a few of his early efforts.
February 25, 2012 at 12:54 am
I liked Topaze but it isn’t fully resolved as a film and Jouvet is acting for the stage a bit…
The Virtuous Sin is one of three Cukors from 1930. The others have Cyril Gardner as co-director, a common practice at the time, it seems.
Early Linder is crude, but it seems to be based in social and domestic situations in a way that’s more sophisticated than Keystone, somehow. But they are more like sketches than short films.
February 25, 2012 at 4:43 am
Yes, co-directors seemed very common in early sound, and at Paramount especially.
February 25, 2012 at 5:24 pm
One for the actors, one for the camera, I guess. Leisen got his start that way.