Leuvielle took the name Max Linder when he entered the movie trade in 1905, only ten years after film was first projected on a screen. He reserved his real name for the stage. At that time, actors did their best to hide their movie work, ashamed to be associated with what was seen as nothing but cheap spectacles for lowlifes. Watching the early films that preceded him, it is easy to see why. French comedy, then considered the best in the world, consisted of little more than extended chase scenes with leaping and gesticulating gendarmes and errant husbands running through the streets, crashing through windows and doors, before collapsing in a heap.
Max added a new ingredient, character. His role was that of the Parisian dandy, an elegantly dressed boulevardier with an eye for the beautiful demoiselles. Comic situations sprang from the everyday events in his character's normal surroundings. In Troubles Of A Grasswidower (Max reprend sa liberte - 1912) an argument with his wife leads her to run home to Mother. Max has to deal with housework for the first time leading not only to chaos, but a chaos instantly recognizable to any wife whose husband has made a mess of a simple cleaning.
Max even introduced touches of social satire in these early movies. In Max Sets The Style (Max lance le mode, 1911) Max is forced to trade his elegant shoes for the decrepit boots of a man on the street. When his society friends laugh at him, Max insists that his huge, floppy footwear is the latest style, and then sets out to make them a necessary element of high fashion with hilarious results.
Max's comedic inventions inspired Charlie Chaplin who used them to make himself the greatest comedian of all time. The debt is obvious. Chaplin's first role as a down-on-his-lucky dandy in Making A Living (1914) is a slight variation on the Max character while his classic One A.M. (1916) is so close to a Max Linder comedy, it can only be considered an homage, if not an outright steal. Max did not mind, considering Chaplin his superior: "He calls me his teacher, but, for my part, I have been lucky to get lessons at his school."
However, the resemblance of his style to Chaplin's may have backfired. He came to America in 1917 to replace Chaplin at Essanay Studios but his shorts did not find an audience. Perhaps, to American audiences, he seemed another of the then ubiquitous Chaplin imitators. After some feature films in the 1920's, Max returned to Europe. He and his wife committed joint suicide in 1925. He may have been depressed over his declining popularity but he could also have been suffering the lingering effects of gas poisoning he underwent during his service in World War I.
Image Entertainment's new DVD Laugh With Max Linder has no relation to the similarly titled film his daughter compiled in 1963, but does contain an excellent collection of Max's work including his complete American feature Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), scenes from another 1921 feature Be My Wife, four of his early French shorts and a newsreel clip of Max boxing with director Maurice Tourneur. Robert Israel accompanies the movies on piano using period arrangements. The liner notes are unfortunately skimpy, but there is no stinting on the comedy. While many movie pioneers, whose work seemed fresh and inventive at the time, seem cliched and dated now through overuse of their ideas, the same cannot be said of Max's comedies. They are still hilarious and one can only hope this is merely the first volume in a series that will restore Max Linder's work to its former prominence.
For more information about Laugh With Max Linder, visit Image Entertainment.
by Brian Cady
