Book Report: Chain of Fools

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Chain of Fools
Silent Comedy and Its Legacies
from Nickelodeons to YouTube
by Trav S.D.

Trav S.D. —oddly enough named after his gritty home town in the middle of South Dakota's Badlands — is a so-good-he's-bad vaudevillian: a performer, producer, historian, popularizer, and blogger whose popular blog Travalanche is a must for the variety arts fan.

I remember when I first came across his book, No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book that Made Vaudeville Famous. I couldn't help but think "do we really need another history of vaudeville?" Then I read the book and discovered that the author was a really good writer, a prodigious researcher, and had a fresh slant on his subject matter. When I heard he was publishing a book on silent film comedy, I couldn't help but think "do we really need another history of silent film comedy?" Then I read the book and... yep, you guessed it.

Trav S.D.

A lot of people read book reviews but don't read books, but if you're just the opposite and are already zoning out then let me cut to the chase and simply say that if you're reading this blog (on purpose) then you'll probably find Chain of Fools highly entertaining and informative.


Here's just a few of the things you will like about it:

• I highlighted something on almost every page. It's just chock full of info that was new to me and very interesting.
• He writes very lively and conversational prose, the kind I like to write but don't always succeed at. Nothing pedantic here. He searches for and almost always finds an interesting way to say what he has to say.

• He's very good at context. You really get the feeling what the work and artistic environment must have been for those creating this new medium.

• He makes a convincing case for silent film comedy as a unique art form and not just as a collection of funny performers.

• He doesn't pretend that every silent film comedy was wonderful.

• He's strong on the relationship between story and character.

• He appreciates what Paris and French culture meant to the arts and the growth of cinema.
• He makes Mack Sennett very interesting.
• He has fresh insights on many of the comedians; Harry Langdon and Lupino Lane, to name just two.


Any weaknesses, quibbles, reservations?

• It's sparsely illustrated, and the discussion of individual films will have much more value if you have them on DVD or can find them online. Since he can't assume you do, a lot of space has to be devoted to plot summaries. He handles them well, but exposition is exposition.
• His pre-cinema comedy history is sketchy and is missing some pretty clear links between the two eras.
• Physical techniques aren't discussed in any detail.
• Max Linder's feature films are given short shrift, and some of the comedians of the 40s and 50s (e.g., 3 Stooges; Abbott & Costello; Ritz Brothers; Jerry Lewis) are a little too summarily dismissed for my taste.
• There are a few errors I caught. For example, Keaton's pole vault in College is lauded, but this was actually performed by gold medalist Lee Barnes, and it was apparently the only time (at least in the silent era) when Keaton used a stunt double. That being said, there's no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of the work.

W.C. Fields in Sally of the Sawdust

Here are a few samples of his excellent writing:

I tend to think of Keaton as a verb; Chaplin as a noun.

This principle of ultimate action, of perpetual motion, was not discovered overnight, but came gradually, experimentally, in the same way Jackson Pollock arrived at drip painting or Charlie Parker came to bebop. It was a process of taking matters a little further, a little further, a little further over dozens of films until Sennett hit a new comedy dimension that looked like universal chaos.

There was very little precedent for what Sennett would now attempt. This would be the first time in history a studio head would endeavor to staff an entire company with absurd types. Sennett's comedians resembled human cartoons: fat men, bean poles, vamps, men with funny mustaches, matronly wives and mothers-in-law wielding rolling pins and umbrellas; geezers with canes and long beards, bratty children with enormous lollipops. Diminutive heroes; terrifyingly large villains.

Keaton's character may have a place in society, but he realizes that this is no guarantee of security or even tranquiity. What about the safe that may fall on your head? Or conversely, the wallet full of money that may miraculously fall into your hands. Rich or poor makes no difference. Fate makes playthings of us all. Man plans. God laughs. Keaton seems to feel no need to comfort us about this. No one emerges to make things better. The world is  cruel, capricious, barren of any special benevolence. It is this lack of faith or optimism perhaps that causes Keaton's comedies to speak more to our time than to his own, and made him a big hit with European audiences even as many Americans were scratching their heads.

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You can buy Chain of Fools here.

Fairbanks, Linder and the Three Musketeers

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Max Linder produced, wrote, and directed three feature films for his own company: Seven Years Bad Luck (released Feb. 1921), Be My Wife (Dec. 1921), and The Three Must-Get-Theres (Aug. 1922). I've already written about Seven Years Bad Luck, and I guess I really do have some readers because I learned shortly thereafter that there was a short wait to rent it on Netflix.  The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

Speaking of the sword, in 1921 Douglas Fairbanks released one of his popular swashbucklers, The Three Musketeers, based on the classic French novel by Alexandre Dumas père.  A year later, Max Linder released the above-mentioned The Three Must-Get-Theres — get it?—  his 55-minute parody of the Fairbanks two-hour epic. The French title, L'Étroit Mousquetaire, is also a pun, but with the less satisfactory literal meaning of "the narrow musketeer," though apparently étroit can also mean petty.

[AN ASIDE:  Dumas père is not to be confused with his son, Alexandre Dumas fils, the playwright who wrote Camille, the basis for Verdi's opera La Traviata. You can download the original Dumas père novel for free from Project Gutenberg by clicking here.]

Douglas Fairbanks was Hollywood's first big action hero and co-founder in 1919 of United Artists with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Though no clown, he was a comic action hero, more Johnny Depp than Mel Gibson, with an eye for physical comedy.  If you haven't seen his work, check out his acrobatic prowess in the video of him on my parkour post.

[AN ASIDE:  Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. is not to be confused with his son, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., also a movie star, though in the 1930s and 1940s, and not so much the action hero.]

Here's the entry on the Linder film from Europa Film Treasures, penned by no less an authority than David Robinson, author of the definitive Chaplin biography and other notable works:

Linder is said to have considered The Three Must-Get-Theres the best film of his career. It came out almost exactly one year after the release of The Three Musketeers, but the success and furore of Douglas Fairbanks’s opulent spectacle were still fresh enough in the audience’s memory to justify Linder’s parody.

With his wig always a little awry, Max parodies Fairbanks’s elegance, athleticism, and beaming self-satisfaction. The story and characters are directly caricatured from the original: Richelieu becomes Rich-Lou, and Buckingham, Bunkumin, while Max becomes Dart-in-Again, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are whimsically renamed Walrus, Porpoise, and Octopus.

The best-remembered moment of Max’s emulation of Fairbanks’s balletic athleticism is his deft and lethal stratagem when surrounded by a ring of swords. Much of the humour depends on surreal anachronism, so that Max is inclined to change his faithful donkey for a motorcycle, or cross the channel on a sailing horse. Fairbanks clearly appreciated the parody, and is said to have sent Linder a gracious congratulatory telegram.

The first time I watched The Three Must-Get-Theres, I didn't find it as funny as I had hoped to.  Then I watched Fairbanks' movie, followed by a second viewing of the Linder parody, and enjoyed it much more.  Likewise, audiences viewing Linder's comedy would likely have been very familiar with the Fairbanks blockbuster.

So here are a few clips, showing you Fairbanks scenes followed by the Linder version.

Here's Fairbanks as D'Artagnan, tearfully leaving his small village and his dear papa to seek fame and fortune in Paris:




Romantic, sentimental, and noble, n'est-ce pas?  And now here's Linder's extended exit, with the father-son affection being mirrored by the cow-horse farewell.





Next up is a Fairbanks sword fight:




And here are two slightly less gallant sword scenes from Linder:





So you get the idea.

Since this is a physical comedy blogopedia, I have to include one of my favorite Linder moves from this film, a nifty pass-through maneuver:



Finally, to switch gears, a quick comparison of a Linder 3-high elopement and  a parallel scene in Keaton's Neighbors.





Just for the record, Neighbors was released December 22, 1920; The Three Must-Get-Theres in August, 1922.  For more on physical comedy involving 3-highs and other assorted human pyramids, check out this On the Shoulders of Giants blog post.  One of my personal favorites.

After all this, I'm hoping you'll want to see The Three Must-Get-Theres movie for yourself, and now you can thanks to the good folks at Europa Film Treasures.  Just click here — and enjoy the whole movie, with original music composed by Maud Nelissen in 2009, performed by The Sprockets.

 
Finally, for  a review in Spanish from the excellent Circo Méliès blog, click here. 

Johnny Depp as Max Linder?

[post 111]

Keaton got Donald O'Connor, Chaplin got Robert Downey, Jr., and if screenwriter Samantha Husik has her way, Max Linder would be brought to life by the mega-talented Depp.  Husik, a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts film program, is the author of a new screenplay about Linder's life and career that she is currently shopping around.  I put Linder and Depp into my handy-dandy Morphomatic™  and this is what I got:

Hey, not bad.  You're hired!

I caught up with Samantha in the neighborhood, and asked her a few questions.

What first got you interested in Linder?


I had never heard of or seen Max before I saw Laugh with Max Linder on Netflix Watch Instantly. I thought, “Who is this guy and why haven’t I seen any of his films?” So I looked him up on the internet. I was fascinated by his life story. I also fell in love with his films. It’s a shame that Max and his wonderful films have largely been forgotten. I decided to write a screenplay about him as a way to introduce him to a new audience/generation.

Why do you think he's important?

Linder was a pioneer of early cinema, one of the first and one of the best — unique, multi-talented and influential.  A biopic would showcase his talents, why he and his clever, charming films were once so popular. Linder’s personal life is fascinating to me, particularly his relationship with his wife and their tragic deaths. I suppose my script is a character study: how manic depression drove this talented, charismatic man (and his wife) to suicide.  There is an episode of the Dick Cavett Show where Cavett interviews Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock talks about the fine line between comedy and tragedy. He says, “How often have you seen the old fashioned scene of the man walking toward the open manhole cover. Of course he has to wear a top hat, cause that’s dignity, you see…You watch him and he walks, he’s reading a paper, and he suddenly disappears down the hole. And everybody roars with laughter. But suppose you took a second look and looked down the hole. His head is cut, he’s bleeding. They send for an ambulance…Think how ashamed that audience is that they laughed in the first place.” Hitchcock’s statement describes how I think of Max. To the world, Max was a clown – the guy we laugh at when he falls through the open manhole – but in his private life, Max was tortured and depressed – the guy we would see if we looked in the manhole. Max was a comedic genius, but a troubled man. That’s what most interests me about him and what I hope to show in this biopic.

How do you bring to life artistic genius?  I ask this because a lot of biopics emphasize the lurid — usually drug abuse — but don't necessarily provide insight into artistic genius — not that that's an easy thing to do!
Honestly, I’m not sure. That’s something I’ve been working on; one of the focuses of my rewrites is to capture more of Max’s artistic genius. I want to show his lighter, creative side as much as I show his darker, manic-depressive side.
    
Can you tell us a little bit about your screenplay?
My script focuses on Max’s life/career from 1912 to his death in 1925. The story follows him from the height of his fame, through his war years and his time in America to the last few years of his life with Helene and his descent into manic depression.  I’ve taken some artistic liberties, but I’ve tried to make my script as factual/accurate as possible. Most of the events in the script are based on real events that I learned from Maud Linder’s book and from other research on Max’s life. I’ve also included reenactments of Max’s films so an audience can see examples of Max’s talent – which will hopefully inspire them to watch more of Max’s films.  I’m currently looking for representation that can help me get my script into the right hands!
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Well, with or without Johnny D., we wish Samantha luck!  Any big-time agents or film producers out there?  You can contact Samantha at:  sbh281@gmail.com

Quentin Tarantino & Max Linder: Inglourious Basterds

[post 110]

OK, this one's no more than a curiosity, but since we're still on the subject of Linder....

Tarantino & Linder, an odd coupling, indeed, but no one knows his film history like our man Quentin, so this brief exchange from Inglourious Basterds should not come as a surprise.  In it, two of the four main characters in the movie meet for the first time.  Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) has escaped the massacre of her Jewish family and now, under an assumed identity, is operating this movie theatre in Paris.  Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) is a boyish German soldier who falls for her.

For more on Tarantino and physical comedy, see this previous post.

Book Report: The Max Linder Story

[post 109]

If I've convinced you in my recent posts that Max Linder is worth knowing about, then you might want to read more, no? But when it comes to books (you remember books) there's still nothing in English devoted entirely to Linder, and the two books in French are both by his daughter, Maud Linder. Luckily, they're excellent and it would be great to see them translated into English.

Max Linder Était Mon Père [Max Linder Was My Father]
by Maud Linder
Paris: Flammarion: 1992

So if you missed or forgot my unforgettable first post on Maud Linder, you may not know that in 1925, still in his early forties, Max Linder — the biggest pre-Chaplin international star — died in a double-suicide with his 21-year-old wife, callously leaving behind a 15-month-old daughter, Maud, who grew up not even knowing who her father was until the age of 20.  This book is less a bio of Linder père and more an account of Maud's rediscovery of her father and her subsequent efforts to rediscover his work and revive his artistic reputation. It's a unique tale of a highly intelligent and motivated woman who somehow managed to separate her deep personal pain from her respect for her father's artistic genius.  No easy thing, and quite admirable.

Les Dieux du Cinéma Muet: Max Linder 

[The gods of silent film: Max Linder]

by Maud Linder
Paris: Editions Atlas, 1992

This is a gorgeous book that every Max Linder fan should own, whether you read French or not. It's designed for the coffee-table at 11½' x 14", with144 glossy pages — 36 pages of text, the rest filled with well captioned, high-quality photographs, including 16 pages of color plates:  Linder on set, Linder on stage, Linder in newspapers and magazines, Linder in real life, Linder on film. Especially tantalizing are publicity stills of Linder from lost films, films whose names we no longer know. 

Here are a few shots to whet your appetite:

 

 

 

The Ciné Goes to Town

French Cinema, 1896–1914

by Richard Abel
(University of California Press, 1998)

Last but not least at a hefty 568 pages is this exhaustively researched and insightful academic study of early French cinema, in which Max Linder is a key player.  I have yet to read all of it, but enough to trust Abel's thorough knowledge of the subject. He is especially strong at tying together the growth of film technique, the social forces in France at the time, and the artistic geniuses involved in forging this new art form. While the French are often criticized for claiming they invented everything, they were in fact the main innovators in early cinema.

Although written before the release of the two Linder DVDs reviewed in my previous post, and only taking us through 1914, Abel did manage to see pretty much every early Linder film available at the time, many of which are still unavailable to the public outside of various European film archives.  It's a bit frustrating to read about films you can't see. Hopefully some day we'll be able to plow through this history with instant access to all of the films covered.

DVD Report: The Max Linder Box Set

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The rediscovery and remastering of silent film classics, reintroducing these artists to the public by way of annotated DVD box sets, has been a  great gift to the physical comedy fan. First it was Chaplin and Keaton, then Lloyd and Langdon, followed by Charley Chase, Douglas Fairbanks and, most recently, that modern silent clown, Pierre Etaix.  And now finally the father of silent film comedy, Max Linder, is being justly celebrated for his pioneering career that spanned over 400 films, about 130 of which have survived, in a handsome 6-disc DVD set complete with historical commentaries and new musical scores by New York's own Ben Model.

Okay, I just made all that up. Yep, the DVD cover picture too.  (Blame Photoshop.) Sorry about that, but there's no Max Linder box set, no definitive collection, no historical retrospective. Which is a shame, not only because his work is so deserving of it, but because the passage of time means no one is still alive who worked with him (he died in 1925) to answer all our questions.  (Yes, I have questions.) Keaton and Chaplin were rediscovered in the 60s when they and many of their collaborators were still kicking, resulting in a treasure trove of material on their incredible body of work. No such luck here.

What we do have are two DVDs showcasing some of Linder's work, and it is these I will review here:

Laugh with Max Linder
Image Entertainment (2003)

The Actors: Rare Films of Max Linder

Classic Video Streams (2009)

Laugh with Max Linder was compiled by his daughter Maud and is most valuable for containing his wonderful feature film, Seven Years Bad Luck. It also has a musical score composed to go with the actual films, whereas the Rare Films DVD uses some generic Dixieland music as a background throughout, which does more harm than good.  Oh well, just wait for that definitive DVD box set!

The Rare Films of Max Linder DVD is more recent but contains mostly early films from 1905 to 1912. To give this some chronological perspective, keep in mind that by the time Mack Sennett founded Keystone Studios in 1912, Linder had already made a couple of hundred films.  In 1913, Sennett hired Chaplin, who did not debut his tramp character until the following year. As for Keaton, his first film appearance wasn't until 1917, when he had a role in Fatty Arbuckle's   The Butcher Boy.

So Linder was pretty much on his own, ahead of his time and far from Hollywood, in the beginning grinding out a film a day for Pathé in Paris. In the process, he pretty much invented the comic narrative film. While early filmmakers often used gags as their subject matter (see these previous posts), it was Linder who developed a recognizable character — that of an often inebriated Paris dandy — and began to develop stories around him.  The first movies were nothing more than simple gag ideas, but over time Linder developed his foppish character, his storytelling skills, and his use of film language.

By the time you get to Linder's "feature-length" films (about an hour long), the artistic progress is very much in evidence. Now working in Hollywood and Paris, his fame eclipsed by Chaplin, Linder is still somewhat ahead of his time in shooting features.  Here are the dates of his four features:

The Little Cafe (1919)
Seven Years Bad Luck (1921)
Be My Wife (1921)
The Three Must Get-Theres (1922)

And the dates of the very first features made by Hollywood's fearsome foursome:
• Chaplin — The Kid, 1921
• Lloyd — A Sailor-Made Man, 1921
• Keaton — The Three Ages, 1923
• Langdon — Tramp. Tramp, Tramp, 1926

Max Linder: Character Actor

Max Linder the actor (né Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle) always played the character Max Linder, a well-to-do Parisian with a knack for getting himself into trouble, usually with women, often from too much drinking.  Here's a sequence from the opening of Seven Years Bad Luck:




Later in that movie, disguising himself to hide from the train conductors after having lost his ticket money, Linder shows his versatility as a comic actor:

Max Linder: Gag Meister

Most gags are older than the hills and were not invented by the famous performers who usually get all the credit. Linder's broken mirror routine predates the Marx Brothers by more than a decade, but of course he was hardly the first.  But you know me, I do get my jollies pointing out earlier versions of gags, so here are a couple from Linder's films that you may have seen elsewhere — and many years later.

Ye olde getting your coat caught around a pole routine, from Linder's  Max and the Quinquina (1911):

In case you were wondering about the card bit at the end:  nice plot device. In the first half of the movie, a drunken Linder insults every big shot in town, inciting each of them to challenge him to a duel at dawn, for which they each hand him their business card. In the second half, every time he gets into trouble he produces one of these cards, is immediately mistaken for the big shot, and is given preferential treatment.

And here's Buster Keaton ten years later in The Goat (1921):

And as Hovey Burgess reminds me, Soviet clown Oleg Popov did the same thing in his slack wire routine, "accidentally" wrapping his coat around the wire.  (I haven't been able to find a clip of him doing that exact bit, but probably have it somewhere and will add it here if I do locate it.)


Here's another classic bit from Be My Wife, his 1921 feature film of which only 13 minutes survive.  Max is disguised as a piano teacher so he can get closer to his beloved. When he discovers the piano is too far from the bench, he tries to move the piano rather than the bench. His girlfriend's aunt Agatha shows him the easier way:

And now here's the legendary Swiss clown Grock doing the same gag:

Grock started working with his first partner in 1903, so for all we know he may have beaten Linder to the punch with this one.  In any case, it's Grock who gets the most comedy out of it, fleshing out the gag with his clown's dumb determination and then allowing us to share in the joy this naive character experiences at the revelation that there is indeed a better way.  With Linder it doesn't really work because his far more clever character would never do that, unless as an intentional joke.


Also from Be My Wife is this extended sequence in which Linder stages a mock fight (with himself!) to impress his beloved Mary and especially her aunt that he is the better potential husband, and not Simon, the cowardly milquetoast rival that Aunt Agatha is promoting for the position.

And a similar sequence from Charley Chase's classic Mighty Like a Moose (1926).  Here's the wild situation: Charley and his wife both find themselves unattractive and both secretly undergo medical procedures to improve their looks.  They meet outside the home, fail to recognize each other, and start flirting. Charley is the first to realize the truth of the situation and, as a firm believer in the male's innate right to the double standard, schemes to punish his wife for cheating on him with himself.  Yes, wacky!  So Charley the husband beats up Charley the lover.




Although I hope to get around to writing in more depth about the variations on the broken mirror routine, any introduction to Linder would not be complete without his superb version of it from Seven Years Bad Luck.  In this clip, two amorous servants have just accidentally broken the mirror, and one of them enlists a buddy to hide the misdeed from Max.




What I most like about Linder's gag work, however, is how he learned to develop and integrate gags into his story.  His broken mirror routine can certainly stand on its own, but it is also integral to the plot because the seven years of bad luck that Max spends the whole movie hoping to avoid is triggered by the second breaking of the mirror.  Likewise in the same movie, you'll find a nifty gag wherein an imprisoned Max is cowered into scratching the back of his tough and bullying cellmate.  The reprise of this in the courtroom scene totally works...  but you'll just have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about!

Max Linder: Cinematographer

Coming from the theatre and making his first film in 1905, Linder was an early adapter to the form, no doubt learning through trial and error what worked in the new medium, how to use time, space, and special effects to create comedy beyond what he could do on stage.  In my interview with her, Maud Linder singled out the 1906 short, Max Takes a Bath, as a good example of her father's early use of film. 




Fast forward to 1921's Be My Wife, whose opening scene is a cute visual gag where an overprotective Aunt Agatha is fooled by an optical illusion.




Linder's success and the parallel progress of the art of film allowed him to work with other talented artists who brought greater production values to his movies.  One of these was Charles Van Enger, whose cinematographic talents are very much in evidence in the framing and lighting for Seven Years Bad Luck. Here's his bio from the Turner Classic Movies site.

Charles Van Enger (1890-1980), a leading cinematographer of the silent era, worked with Maurice Tourneur on films such as The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and with Ernst Lubitsch on The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windermere's Fan (1925). Although credited as an assistant cameraman on The Phantom of the Opera (1925), he reputedly set up many important shots in that film. He spent much of his later career at Universal, working on everything from Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). By the late 1950s, he was working mainly in television on shows such as Gilligan's Island.

Wow! From Max Linder to Gilligan's Island — now there's a career span.
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Here's a rundown of what you'll find on each DVD:

Rare Films of Max Linder

A Skater’s Debut (1905) = 4:21
His First Cigar (1906) = 5:05
Max Gets Stuck Up (1906) = 3:01
Max Takes a Bath (1906) = 4:38
Legend of Ponchinella (1906) = 7:32
Max’s Hat (1908) = 8:55
Troubles of a Grass Widower (1908) = 9:48
Max and the Lady Doctor (1909) = 5:59
Max Fears the Dogs (1909) = 2:44
Max and the Quinquina (1911) = 16:44
Max Plays at Drama (1911) = 7:01
Max Juggling for Love (1912)     6:42
Max and his Dog (1912) -- 6:33
Max and the Statue (1912) = 9:58
Max and his Mother-in-Law (1912) = 24:12 (!!)
Be My Wife  (1921) = 13:33


Laugh with Max Linder
Boxing with Maurice Tourneur (1912) = 2:40
Love's Surprises (1913) = 6:13
Max Takes a Picture (1913) = 13:06
Max Sets the Style (1914) = 8:53
Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) = 61:52
Be My Wife  (1921) = 13:33

Both of these DVDs are available from Amazon. Laugh with Max Linder is also available from Netflix and on Amazon video on demand.

Ripple Effect: The Theatrical Life of Max Linder, by Frank Bren

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We may know Max Linder as the first truly international film star, the father of silent film comedy, but he was also a playwright and stage comedian whose live performances drew mobs every bit as frenzied as those that later greeted Chaplin, Sinatra,  and the Beatles.  What is most compelling about his stage work, however, is his innovative combination of film and live performance, the details of which you'll have to read Mr. Bren's article to discover!  And click here to visit Mr. Bren's web site.


 Frank Bren's article first appeared in the excellent journal New Theatre Quarterly.  My warmest thanks to New Theatre Quarterly editor Simon Trussler for kindly granting permission to share this valuable article with my blog readers.

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Bren-Linder

Live from Paris: In Search of Max Linder

[post 106]

Supposedly I'm a big expert on all this clown and physical comedy stuff. Yeah, like I actually have the time to watch all those DVDs overcrowding my shelves.

Sad to admit, but this time last year I knew very little about the French silent film comedian, Max Linder (1883–1925).  I knew he was the first international comic film superstar and that Chaplin revered him. I even knew he died young in what was labeled a double suicide with his 21-year-old wife, Ninette Peters.  All I had seen of him in action, however, were very brief snippets from his surviving films (about 130 out of 400+) included on various anthologies of silent film history. Usually they got passed over quickly as the narration turned to everyone's all-American favorites,  Chaplin & Keaton, Lloyd & Langdon.

I was not terribly impressed by those few glimpses of Linder, not surprising considering that some of them dated all the way back to 1905, a full dozen years before Keaton's first film with Arbuckle.  But when I saw his 1921 film Seven Years Bad Luck, I thought it was clearly one of the best silent film features ever made. Well acted, ingeniously written, and with the best use of the mirror gag ever.  But more on that later!

Shortly thereafter I came across a New Theatre Quarterly article about Linder that was so fascinating that I immediately wrote the magazine's editor, Simon Trussler, to help me get in contact with the author, Frank Bren, whose web site you can reach by clicking here.  (And so good that I begged Mr. Trussler and Mr. Bren to allow me to reprint it on this blog. They very kindly agreed, and you will find it as the very next post.)  Reaching Frank Bren has proved to be a gold mine, for it was he who turned me on to the Pierre Etaix comeback story (see previous Etaix posts) and introduced me to the remarkable Maud Linder, daughter and biographer of Max.

And what a story!

Maud Linder was orphaned at the age of 15 months by her parents' death, and did not realize who her real father was until some twenty years later.  She came to know him only through his films, coming to hate the man who had abandoned his baby daughter, taking her mother with him, and yet very much admiring the artist.  Somehow she was able to separate the two in her mind, and she made it her mission to revive the reputation of the comedian who had once been the most famous entertainer in the world.  I was understandably thrilled when Frank told me that Maud was alive and well and living in Paris and would very likely be quite receptive to meeting me during my April sojourn in Paris.  And so it came to pass!


More than 80 years later, a vibrant and energetic Maud Linder still lives in that same house Linder had built for his family on a gated street in Neuilly, an upscale suburb of Paris.  Though Max never got to live there, he would no doubt be thrilled to see that his daughter has survived and thrived despite all odds and that she has worked so hard to perpetuate his legacy.














In this first segment from my interview with Mme. Linder, she explains her personal mission:

Some thoughts on Linder's legacy and the struggle to keep his work alive in the 21st century:



And here Mme. Linder muses about the difference between a clown and a film comedian:

I may have been 85 years late in my search for the living, breathing Max Linder, but meeting his daughter was both an honor and an inspiration for the posts that follow this one.