Frank Bren

Ripple Effect: the Theatrical Life

of Max Linder
By 1909 the French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most
popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety
and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War. But this followed five years
of frustration in stage-ornament roles on the professional, ʻlegitimateʼ stage, and only after
success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance
his fame in variety venues across Europe. After the war, and Linderʼs stints in Hollywood,
his long descent into bouts of manic depression tragically began. But his theatrical spirit
survives in the cine-stage works of the Prague theatre, Laterna Magika, and Frank Bren
also discusses here his possible influence on the work of Erwin Piscator, and more surely
on the spectacular Paris music-hall production, Jour de fête à l’Olympia, created by and
starring Jacques Tati in 1961. This was plainly modelled on Linderʼs cinema-theatre
creations of 1910–1914, with Tati and Pierre Etaix the outstanding successors to Max in
French film comedy. Australian actor-author Frank Bren is currently writing a biography of
Pierre Etaix, whose classic film comedies of the sixties are now being restored for
international re-release – two of them paying discreet homage to Max Linder. Bren has
written or co-written histories of Polish and Chinese cinema and theatre as well as articles
for diverse international periodicals.

THE NOTION of real suffering as a tool for
art surfaced last year in Forever Enthralled, a
biopic about Mei Lanfang, China’s premier
actor of the twentieth century.1 In the story,
his associates are convinced that Mei’s per-
sonal happiness would undermine the source
of his great talent and so strive to ensure his
misery, powerfully evoking that symbol of
the theatre, the two masks of laughter and
grief.
The dual masks as emblems of the human
condition are always present in good drama
or comedy, but the image is especially vivid
when the character concerned is a profes-
sional clown whose job it is to create laughs.
A well-known example is the play He Who
Gets Slapped by the Russian author Leonid
Andreyev (1871–1919), which premiered in
Moscow in 1915 and spawned a celebrated
film adaptation in Hollywood.2 Andreyev’s
larger concerns about contemporary Russia
and the loss of idealism are here crystallized
into the tale of a disillusioned philosopher
whose friend has stolen his ‘ideas’ and his
wife, and who uses the ‘big top’ as a monas-
tery to escape from life. He persuades a small
circus to hire him as a clown named only
‘He’, who gets his laughs by being relentlessly
slapped in the face. ‘He’ becomes an enor-
mous hit with the public.
The climax has ‘He’ sharing a poisoned
drink with the woman he loves and dying
just after comforting her in death, which
creepily evokes the subject of this article. On
30–31 October 1925 the great French stage
and film comic Max Linder similarly died in
a ‘double suicide’ – apparently modelled on
a scene he liked in the film Quo Vadis?3
Cinema to Theatre
As the French historian Charles Ford wrote:
‘Max Linder was one of the most important,
most fecund creators in the history of the
Seventh Art.’ Together with Georges Méliès
(1861–1938) he was regarded by many as one
of the two greatest pioneers of narrative
cinema before the advent of Charles Chaplin
and D. W. Griffith in the United States.4
Linder also developed an acting style true to
the medium that was a revelation to his con-
temporaries.

ntq 25:3 (august 2009) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X09000426 241

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009 IP address: 147.8.16.124

 The popularity of his films (he was an
author and director too) gained him a theatre
career whose influence went beyond his own
time. His stage tour across Europe in late
1912 drew lucrative film offers in Germany
that effectively launched the era of the
international film star. He was completely
taken aback by the Max-mania of adoring
mobs in Spain, Portugal, and Germany. Once
back in France, he waved the German offers
at his employer, producer Charles Pathé,
demanding and getting unprecedented con-
trol over his professional life, soon becoming
one of the highest paid actors on earth.
By a ripple effect, Linder’s ‘descendants’
include Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the
Marx Brothers, and René Clair through to
two outstanding post-war French comics,
Jacques Tati and Pierre Etaix. A famous dedic-
ation on a photograph says it all: ‘To the one
and only Max, The Professor. From his
Disciple, Charlie Chaplin. Aug. 12 1917.’ 5
The Farm Boy from Bordeaux
Gabriel Maximilien Leuvielle was born on 16
December 1883 at an unhappy time for his
winegrower parents, when vineyards across
France were being ravaged by plant disease.
His birth was registered at the mairie (town
hall) of Saint Loubès, close to Bordeaux in
the south-western département of Gironde.
The family home was in nearby Cavernes, a
village dependency of Saint Loubès. The boy
insisted on being called ‘Max’ from early
childhood.
According to the actor’s later press inter-
views, his parents were once ‘stagefolk’ – pre-
sumably amateur actors; but none of his three
siblings – older brother Maurice, younger
brother Gérard, and, youngest of all, sister
Marcelle – ever shared Max’s passion for the
theatre. At the age of four he fell in love with
puppetry at the annual fair of Saint-Loubès.
Later he attended ‘legitimate’ plays and by
the age of twelve was writing and perform-
ing his own to young neighbours and friends
on a small stage in the family garden.
Exasperated by Max’s indifference to
normal schooling, his parents sent him to a
boarding lycée in Talence, a suburb of Bor-
242
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
deaux, where he avidly applied his energies
to fencing, pole-vaulting, and producing
theatre. The invention and ardour of his pro-
ductions impressed a family friend, Dr
Hector Ducan, the mayor of Saint-Loubès
(and incidentally a reputable poet), who saw
in Max a vocation that was self-evident.
Without telling the parents, Ducan persu-
aded the lycée’s professors to let the boy take
diction lessons from Adrien Caillard, the best
voice teacher in Bordeaux.
The Birth of ‘Max Linder’
When he was eighteen Max, with Ducan as
advocate, convinced his parents to let him
study full-time at the Société Sainte-Cécile,
the Bordeaux drama academy, commencing
in Autumn 1902. Sheer chance led to his first
professional engagement with the local ‘rep’,
the Théâtre des Arts de Bordeaux, situated in
Biarritz, during his first year at the academy.
On the day before an advertised premiere,
the theatre lost three principal actors who
were swept to their deaths by a vicious
undercurrent while they strolled along the
seashore of Biarritz. Max knew their roles by
heart and rushed to see the director, M.
Grandey, who hired him to take on one of the
roles for the opening performance only, with
the promise to consider him again should
Max stick to his studies.
A programme dated 7 July 1903 for the
concours (competitive examinations) of the
Société Sainte-Cécile lists ‘Leuvielle, Gabriel,
19 years 8 months’ performing in segments
of Les Romanesques by Edmond Rostand (in
the role of Percinet), Par Droite de Conquête by
Legougé, and Les Ouvriers by L. Manuel. Les
Romanesques earned Max the second prize for
comedy – top prize, in fact, as the first was
officially withheld.
He left the academy soon after the con-
cours to apply for work at the Théâtre des
Arts, where Grandey’s successor, Bachelet,
agreed to employ the young man, mostly in
minor roles for the 1903–04 season. To
appease his father, who dreaded stage pub-
licity involving the family name, Max first
took the stage surname ‘Lacerda’; but while
promenading with Marcelle one day in
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 Bordeaux, Max saw the name ‘Linder’ in a Faces of the young Max Linder. Above, the apprentice
shoeshop window and immediately adopted Max Leuvielle with Bordeaux actor M. Geraizer. Above
left and below: as actor Max Lacerda with the Bordeaux
that in its place. Arts Theatre in Biarritz – acceding to parental wishes
Meanwhile, his former diction teacher and not to use the family name.
friend, Adrien Caillard, had quit Bordeaux to
join the Ambigu-Comique theatre in Paris as
an actor-director, and Max itched to be in the
capital too. Again through Ducan’s interces-
sion, his parents accepted the inevitable,
even providing their son with a small but
regular allowance, and in the autumn of 1904
Max took the train to Paris from Bordeaux to
realize his vision of graduating from the Paris
Conservatoire and acting with the Comédie
Française in the comedies of his beloved
Molière.

The Theatres of Paris, 1904

Contemporary French newspapers and al-
manacs richly convey the scope and texture
of the theatre scene in Paris in 1904 through
bulletins, gossip, reviews, first-night cast
lists, and open letters between stage artists.
Published daily, such reports continued to Among contemporary names on the scene
chart Max’s theatre career along with the were Sarah Bernhardt, continuing at the
names of his fellow actors and exact dates of height of her powers as actor-producer, and
the seasons at two prominent ‘boulevard’ her friend, Réjane (Gabrielle Réju, 1856–1920),
theatres, the equivalent in Paris of London’s also running a theatre in her own name.
West End. Bernhardt’s portrayal of the title role in

243

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009 IP address: 147.8.16.124

 Hamlet remained fresh in the memory from
its first major season in May–June 1899. Her
career – graduation from the Conservatoire
as a teenager, leading actor for many years at
the Odéon and with the Comédie rançaise,
becoming one of the world’s great actor-
managers, frequently touring abroad, tailor-
ing her repertoire to variety or vaudeville
venues, even her readiness to appear on film –
surely set a benchmark for ambitious young
actors such as Max.
The Comédie Française, based at 6 Rue
Richelieu,6 was then the oldest ‘flagship’
stage company in Europe. Its repertoire that
year included twenty-two ‘classics’ – domin-
ated by twelve plays of Molière, with others
by Corneille, Racine, Jean-François Regnard,
Marivaux, and Beaumarchais. In addition,
there were thirty-five ‘modern’ productions
by authors such as Victor Hugo, Alfred de
Musset and Alexandre Dumas, père and fils.7
The Comédie and other long-established
theatres numbered twenty-two in all, while
the city’s remaining théâtres du quartier,
music halls, and café-concerts hovered around
eighty, including the famous horror venue,
the Grand Guignol at 20 Rue Chaptal.
In Autumn 1904, Max auditioned for the
Paris Conservatoire, the key to employment
with the Comédie Française. But he was
harshly rejected by his auditioner, the actor
Louis Leloir, as ‘an old ham’ (vieux cabot),
and was rejected again in 1905 and 1906.8
Adrien Caillard came to the rescue. On 20
October 1904, with only a few hours’ warn-
ing, Max plunged into his first professional
engagement in Paris, a minor role as the
captain of a ship in distress for the Ambigu-
Comique’s opening night of Le Tour du monde
d’un Enfant de Paris by Ernest Morel. In the
words of the film and theatre historian René
Jeanne: ‘Entangled in a text he had no time to
learn, and in clothes not made to his meas-
urements, the “old ham” avoided total disas-
ter thanks entirely to the fall of the curtain’.9
Caillard joined the cast for the Ambigu’s
next production, Le Crime d’Aix, in a leading
role. Max had a virtual ‘extra’ ( figurant) role.
Still, the name ‘Linder’ appeared for the first
time in the cast lists published by major
newspapers of the day.10 The play’s tale of
244
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
family dishonour and redemption featured a
controversial set-piece straight out of Grand
Guignol (a venue that relished its spectators
swooning in the stalls) – a cat-and-mouse
strangling scene that lasted several minutes,
drawing anguished whistles and protests
(’Enough! Enough!’) from the auditorium. It
ensured full houses.11
Cinema-Theatre
More significant was the Ambigu’s revival of
Le Fleuriste des Halles by Henri Demesse on
15 June 1905, which provided Max’s first
experience of film as part of stage action.
Originally produced at the theatre on 23 July,
1902, the play’s innovative projection of
filmed dream scenes (’Evocation of a Crime’
and ‘Charge of the Cuirassiers at Reichs-
hoffen’) required strict safety precautions.
The projector had to be placed outside the
theatre in a courtyard to the rear, sealed in an
iron box so that any fire would incinerate just
the contents, including the operator, with the
audience unaware that, metres away, ‘a man
was being braised’.12
The cinematograph had previously shared
the boards of a Paris theatre some years
earlier, with the performance of L’Auvergnate
by M. Meynet and Marie Geffroy. Charles
Martel reported in L’Aurore: ‘September 29,
1899, is a date for the theatre annals. Yes-
terday, for the first time, the cinematograph
was employed as a dramatic device onstage.
The honour goes to the Théâtre de la
République.’13
Its story anticipates that of Michaelangelo
Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-up, in which suc-
cessive enlargements of detail in a photo-
graph reveal the corpse of a murder victim.
In l’Auvergnate, a cinematograph serves jus-
tice after a woman who has murdered her
husband frames another woman for the deed,
until two cinematograph salesmen discover
they have unwittingly recorded the murder
while filming in a park. ‘No more judicial
errors!’ commented Martel. ‘What an artistic
advance.’14 The revival offered Max the germ
of an idea he would develop as his speciality
for several music-hall venues in Paris and
throughout Europe.
IP address: 147.8.16.124

At the Variétés
Legend claims, despite the different origin
noted above, that ‘Max Linder’ composed
his name from those of his favourite stage
stars – Max Dearly and Marcelle Lender –
both of them regulars at the Théâtre Variétés,
which, according to René Jeanne, was then in
especially brilliant form, its best in fifty
years. Certainly, Dearly seemed to be every-
where, interspersing seasons at the Variétés
with engagements at other theatres, includ-
ing music-hall venues such as the Olympia
and Moulin Rouge. For a time, like Maurice
Chevalier, he accompanied Mistinguett, one
of the greatest female stars of French music
hall, as her song and dance partner.
Dearly was an unusual composite, a comic
equally at ease in the music halls, the circus,
or traditional theatre. To Jacques-Charles,15
one of the top French variety producers
before and after the First World War, Dearly
was ‘our earliest chic comic’, the first real
clown of the great French music-hall century,
from the 1860s to the 1960s, to dispense with
flamboyant make-up and ‘funny’ clothes,
proving how much funnier absurdity was
when played ‘straight’. Having travelled in
his younger days with an English circus,
Dearly favoured a persona parodying the
elegantly dressed Englishman, and certain
descriptions of him evoke a younger John
Cleese. Perhaps Max Linder drew his Beau
Brummel screen silhouette from Dearly.
Almost as soon as he began with the
Variétés in 1906, Max drew his first solid
notices in Paris for his role in La Main Droite,
André Barde’s short curtain-raiser for the
main play, Miquette et sa mère, starring Eve
Lavallière (Miquette), Charles Prince, and
Max Dearly. Gil Blas observed of the curtain
raiser on 5 November 1906: ‘A charming
fantasy, light in tone, so beautifully acted by
Messrs Carpentier, Max Linder, Mlles Marius,
and Frèmaux, was warmly greeted by the
house and marvellously completes a lovely
evening at the Variétés.’16
Miquette premiered on 2 November 1906 to
enthusiastic reviews, making Linder’s first
experience with this theatre a huge step up
from his time at the Ambigu. Yet that was as
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
good as it got. He remained a secondary-role
player until and including his last-known
role there – William Touret in Le Roi (1908), a
much-praised work by the two authors of
Miquette, Robert de Flers and Gaston A. de
Caillavet, with Emmanuel Arène. Max
understudied Dearly, but the latter remained
in robust good health. But Linder’s schedule
was full, the training was good, and he was
pictured a few times in the twice-monthly Le
Théâtre magazine.17
From the Boulevards to the Cigale
Max had continued making film after film in
great variety since 1905 – often one per day –
for Pathé Frères, the world’s largest inter-
national film empire of the time. Initially this
was for a daily 20 francs to supplement his
meagre theatre wage of 150 francs a month,
but he was mastering the medium and, as a
comedian, he was evolving a screen presence.
The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly
(London) of 23 July 1908 contains the earliest
record I have seen of Max Linder’s use of the
‘cinematograph’ onstage. The report identi-
fies him only as ‘one of the artistes [recently]
performing at the Pathé theatre’, namely the
Cirque d’Hiver (then run as a Pathé cinema),
for a staff party thrown by Charles Pathé. But
it describes the exact ‘number’ Max would
make famous across Europe:
An interesting feature of a long programme was
the presentation of a film in which [the artiste]
was seen receiving a telephone message and leav-
ing his house hurriedly for the theatre. Colliding
with numerous passers-by, a chase is set up and
the artiste is seen entering the theatre in rags. The
artiste himself then appeared on stage and took
up the tale of his adventures, the novelty being a
great hit.
Around that time, Max’s name disappears
from the cast lists of the Variétès and he was
presumably focusing on films, though it was
not until 2 September 1909 that the British
trade weekly The Bioscope, reviewing A Young
Lady Killer, could identify him to its readers –
apparently for the first time – as ’Mr Max
Linder, who creates the principal role in this
picture, [who] is, we think, one of the best
cinematographic actors there is’ .
245
IP address: 147.8.16.124

Max soon resurfaced theatrically as a
compère-character named ‘Le Roi’ in a revue
entitled Et aie donc! (’Yikes!’) staged at the
Cigale from 28 October to 30 November
1909, written by Paul Ardot and Rip.18 Max –
‘the adroit and elegant compère [with] the
inimitable chic’– was third in the cast list, so
the apprentice had finally arrived by quitting
the ‘legitimate’ stage, which actually shat-
tered his boyhood dreams. Fred Karno’s
famous troupe (including Charles Chaplin),
newly arrived from England, opened their
short season of The Mumming Birds at the
Folies-Bergère almost simultaneously with
the opening of Et aie donc!
Two Olympia Revues
Today, one of Paris’s oldest surviving music-
hall venues is the Olympia, on the Boulevard
des Capucines. Before Bruno Coquatrix re-
opened it in 1954 as a serious music-hall
venue, its earlier heyday was around the
246
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
time (1910) Max joined the cast of its lavish
two-hour La Grande Revue, written by Lucien
Boyer and Maurice Millot, in a season which
ran from 2 April to 30 June. The enormous
cast was aided by the Olympia ballet, plus
groups like the ‘Eight Blossom Girls’, the
‘Eight Scotch Collies’, a choir from the Gaîté-
Lyrique theatre, and ‘fifty children’ with, in
all, twenty-six scenes or tableaux. Among
other numbers, Max aired his theatre-cinema
act for the first time in a major production:
Yesterday, La Grande Revue, with its decors, its
eight hundred costumes, its effects and its ‘num-
bers’ unfurled brilliantly before a fascinated, won-
derstruck public. It is impossible to describe such
splendours like a menu. Let us just say that
certain ‘star turns’ suffice to make this revue the
‘hot ticket’ of the year, notably the cinema scene,
in which filmed characters suddenly appear and
then become living actors – an epic scene, truly
hilarious, ingenious. Le Matin, 4 April 1910
The main attractions! Too many! First, there’s that
scene, never shown before, which commences with
the telephone at the Olympia, then proceeds via
the cinematograph all around Paris, through its
streets and boulevards, finishing up once again in
the Olympia with [the audience] in stitches. Max
Linder is the hero of this adventure.
Le Figaro, 4 April 1910
Max Linder, fantastic, joyous, in the priceless scene
of the brought-to-life cinematograph!
Le Figaro, 25 May 1910
Contemporary shows elsewhere in Paris in-
cluded La Revue des Folies Bergères with
Maurice Chevalier and the Scala’s Revue de la
Scala, headlined by the drily humorous voc-
alist, Polin, whose nephew, Louis Leplée,
was to give Jacques Tati and Edith Piaf their
first professional breaks in the Paris club
scene of the 1930s.19
Yet another revue featured Max at the
Olympia that year – the three-hour Vive Paris!
which ran from 20 October to 11 November,
and boasted thirty-five scenes, two hundred
artistes, eight hundred costumes, dogs,
horses, etc., written by Maurice Millot and
directed by Alfredo Curti.20 However, before
the end of the run Max’s friend the writer
Armand Massard reported in La Presse on 10
November that the previous night the comic
had suffered a violent attack of appendicitis.
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 This required and received urgent sur-
gery, with Max’s post-operative condition
reported to be ‘grave’. But he returned to
Saint-Loubès to recuperate in the company
of his family, and among his surviving films
Max en Convalescence was – true to form – a
comic variation on those real circumstances.
It co-starred sister Marcelle, his parents, and
an annoying horse. Otherwise it was an idle
several weeks before Max considered more
theatre and film engagements.

Personal Appearances – or Theatre?

There are varying accounts of just when and
how Max understood his real earning power,
leading by stages to Charles Pathé offering
him an unprecedented one million francs per
annum in 1914.
Naturally, he attracted much attention at
public appearances in Paris, for which he
was presumably well paid. In 1912 he made
occasional appearances until September – for
example, in early April for a week in his own Opposite page: to survive, Max posed regularly for
‘farcical sketch’ at the Cirque d’Hiver postcards such this. Above: the elegant silhouette, as
famous then as Charles Chaplinʼs tramp was later to
(Cinema Pathé); 21 and on 6 June he appeared become. Below: a skit at the Cigale, with Jeanette
at the Brasserie Rochechouart cinema as Denarber as his partner.
‘Max’ alongside the famous film detective
‘Nick Winter’, performing a boxing match on
roller skates for the benefit of the French
Military Aeroplane Fund.22 Even this was a
solidly rehearsed variation of Max’s ‘cinema’
sketch; but it earned a ‘rave’ from the Bioscope:

I do not think I have ever heard such genuine

applause as greeted Max Linder’s sketch. It was a
terrific success. . . . The ‘cinematographic sketch’
has a great future.23

In September 1912, Max, accompanied by the

famous actor/dancer Stacia Napierkowska,
played to great acclaim at stage venues in
Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon – again, in
shows that combined ‘live’ and filmed
scenes. In Spain he needed police protection
from the mobs, and the whole tour ended
with a triumphant four-week season all
through December at Berlin’s Wintergarten
theatre, which paid him handsomely for
about fifteen minutes onstage every night in
a sketch entitled ‘Pedicure for Love’, later to
become a Max Linder film.

247

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009 IP address: 147.8.16.124

 In February 1913, plans were announced
for his tour of Russia where, in 1911, a news-
paper poll had voted him the most popular
male actor in the world. On 6 March, the
Bioscope’s John Cher announced that Charles
Prince – a leading actor at the Variétés and
ultimately, as the character ‘Rigadin’, Max’s
main film competitor in France –
is going to do some ‘film sketching’. Yes, everyone
is doing it. . . . It seems as if the tables are being
turned on the picture theatre; managers and cinema
stars are jumping as rapidly from screen to stage as
vice versa.24
The Olympia Season and the Alhambra
Jacques-Charles, who ran the Olympia from
1911 to 1914, presented Max Linder there
twice (see Note 15), the first occasion being
entirely on film, namely the Saison Max
Despite never making it into the Comédie Française,
Max taught the famous Comédie actor Charles le Bargy
how to fence
248
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
Linder which is of interest for the film Max
Toréador – a record of one of the comic’s most
dangerous ‘live’ performances, the fruit of
his 1912 visit to Barcelona.
A Barcelona journalist had run an article
doubting Max’s real ability as the athlete he
appeared to be on screen. That evening, Max
declared onstage to a packed theatre (where
he was performing with Napierkowska) that
he would prove his abilities by bullfighting
in any of Barcelona’s arenas. The manager of
those rings, present in the audience, pro-
posed his own amphitheatre, and there was a
huge ovation. Max honoured his promise by
taking lessons from professional bullfighters
before confronting a bull in the ampitheatre
crammed with 30,000 eager spectators. Hap-
pily, he survived to make Max Toréador using
film footage of the event.
That was the standard dedication of a
man who, outside his art, reportedly dis-
dained sport. His films reinforce his image as
a dashing athlete, a man of action in the
mould of Douglas Fairbanks, and the image
was real. He had been an excellent fencer
since his lycée days in Bordeaux, and had even
given lessons to Charles le Bargy, a popular
leading actor of the Comédie Française whose
doors were otherwise closed to a man rejected
three times by the Paris Conservatoire.
Fittingly, as an introduction to his playlet,
C’est le Tango qui est cause de ça (Blame it on the
Tango), Max reintroduced his famous ‘cinema’
number in a new show at the Alhambra, the
former Théâtre de la République (also the
Théâtre Château d’Eau), in Rue de Malte,
where the cinematograph had made its stage
debut.25 The Alhambra was run by British
interests and employed many English and
American variety artists.
The production opened on 30 August
1913, with Max headlining, performing his
own sketch preceded by a film showing him
in an air balloon moving directly over the
Alhambra itself. Then followed his exit from
the balloon and live descent onto the stage.
The admiration at the Alhambra for Max Linder is
immense, which is no surprise given the popu-
larity the excellent comedian has attained through
the very amusing films everyone wanted to see
from the time he started acting in them. Here we
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 applaud him in person for a sketch he especially
wrote for the Alhambra, entitled Blame it on the
Tango. The rather dangerous method used by Max
Linder to make his stage entrance is original
enough [but] resulted in a small though not seri-
ous accident. As for the sketch, it keeps us in fits
of laughter for twenty-five minutes.
Comoedia Illustré, 20 September 1913

According to the daily L’Humanité of 3

September 1913: ‘We have never witnessed
anything like [the audience’s] acclamations
nor such enthusiasm.’ On 23 September the
paper reported that ‘around three thousand
spectators cram each performance just to
come and applaud him’, noting that the
Alhambra adopted the English style of music
hall – ‘fast and amusing, with a great central
attraction [namely] Max Linder who calls
himself the King of Cinema, and he’s not
wrong’.
The show ran until 30 September, after
which Max prepared to tour similar material
to Russia from November.

Max versus Max – a Touch of Travesti

Throughout November and December 1913
Max was busy in Eastern Europe performing
and warding off mobs of adoring fans from
St Petersburg to Odessa, Moscow to Warsaw.
Or was he? Because, from 12 December he
seemed to be appearing prominently in a
Paris dance revue, Si j’ose m’exprimer ainsi (If
I May Be So Bold), on the tiny stage of the new
Théâtre Doré – the revamped Boite à Fursy.
This was in fact a travesti act featuring Irene
Bordoni in a wonderful take on . . . Max
Linder. The comic must have liked what he
heard for he would ask Bordoni to work with
him on stage in the following year.

Manifestations of the Max hysteria which swept Europe in 1913. Above: a personal appearance in Germany.
Below, left: bullfighting in Spain. Below, right: caricature of Max in the British film trade weekly, The Bioscope.

249

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009 IP address: 147.8.16.124


Essanay promotional material for Maxʼs first film after
his first move to Hollywood.
Meanwhile Max in person was confirm-
ing his enormous screen popularity with live
performances throughout Eastern Europe.
Yuri Tsivian provides the best account of the
Russian part of that tour in his essay ‘Russia,
1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape’.
Tsivian describes a prank played on the comic
at the Moscow Bat, a famous cabaret venue:
Max, whose Beau-Brummel figure was al-
most as familiar as Chaplin’s later tramp,
attended one of Bat’s special ‘soirées’, only
to be interviewed on stage by a local actor,
expertly made up as his double, before a
small chorus of Max lookalikes appeared, all
hailing the original. It was probably the ‘germ’
of the grand production of Irene Bordoni’s
reprised ‘Max’ act at the Folies-Marigny the
following year.26 In early December, perfor-
ming onstage in St Petersburg, the then little-
kown Dmitri Tiomkin provided Max’s
musical accompaniment.
For Sergei Eisenstein, a stage director
before becoming a great filmmaker, three
names stood out when he recalled his earliest
250
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
attraction to the cinema: the film Cabiria
(directed in Italy by Giovanni Pastrone,
1914), and two comics – John Bunny and
Max Linder.27 Linder’s impact extended to
Eisenstein’s own theatre work – or his first
film, produced (in the manner of Linder) for
use in a 1923 stage production in Moscow of
Alexander Ostrovsky’s Diary of a Rascal.
Becoming increasingly acknowledged as a
playwright, Max teamed with Max Aghion
to co-write a revue, Elle est de . . . Max Linder
et Max Aghion, for the old music-hall venue,
Gaîté-Rochechouart, opening on 28 March
1914, and running until 5 April. It included a
new introductory film scene, set on a train
and in the streets of Paris, from which the
principals emerged live to compere the en-
suing revue.
Unusually, there was no Max the perfor-
mer, but for Le Matin the revue was ‘remark-
ably spiritual, crammed with irresistibly
funny scenes, perfectly staged. The reaction
to the fantasy of Messrs Max Linder and Max
Aghion was genuinely enthusiastic . . . . A
total success.’
The Folies-Marigny – and War
A revue entitled in one newspaper Max
Linder in the Flesh at the Folies-Marigny included
his own short playlet Deputé, a five-hander
co-starring himself, Mlle G. Ryser, and Fred
Pascal. Also in the show was Raimu, later
one of French cinema’s greatest actors.
Then there was petite Irene Bordoni. Her
travesti number from the Théâtre Doré
became the fully expanded Spitting Images
(Les Sosies), starring Bordoni with nine other
women – all as Max Linder! This was perhaps
the genesis of Max’s famed ‘broken mirror’
routine, used in his Hollywood film Seven
Years’ Bad Luck (1920).
At the Marigny, critics bestowed bouquet
after bouquet:
The colossal success of Max Linder, playing in a
sketch of his own composition, surpasses all
expectations. . . . Yesterday saw the greatest explo-
sion of laughter and gaiety you could possibly
imagine. In hiring Max Linder, M. Jacques-
Charles (director of the theatre) has pulled off a
masterstroke. Le Matin, 11 June 1914
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 And Le Figaro on 12 June 1914 described the
show as ‘a triumph’, asking ‘How does one
prefer this excellent artist? On screen or in
the flesh on stage? . . . Today, at the Marigny,
we can see Max both ways.’
Within weeks, the outbreak of world war
cut short the Folies-Marigny season – one of
Max’s last few on stage. It was a heady
ascent from the Ambigu debut ten years
earlier and, theatrically, his peak. There was
as yet no sign – except in convenient hind-
sight – of his later complete disillusion with
life after the manner of Andrejev’s ‘He’.

The Legacy of Max Linder

It is easy enough to confirm Max Linder’s
legacy to the cinema through his surviving
films; but the theatre requires evidence from
contemporary witnesses whose views we
have to assess – the likes of René Jeanne and
the numerous professional critics of the day.
There is no proof that Linder influenced in-
novators such as Erwin Piscator (1893–1966),
whose ‘epic theatre’ productions in Germany
after the First World War used film projec-
tions. But maybe Piscator (and his assistant,
Bertolt Brecht) took a leaf from Linder’s ‘film
plays’ that were famous across Europe from
1910 to 1914. He must have been aware of the
French comic’s performances at the Berlin
Wintergarten’s vaudeville theatre in Decem-
ber 1912, for the season was well-publicized
and, like the rest of Linder’s stage tour that
year, deliriously successful.
But a spectacular example of his legacy
appeared in Paris in late April 1961 with
Jacques Tati’s music-hall production of Jour
de fête à l’Olympia, borrowing much from
Max’s own cinema-theatre playlet at the same
Olympia in 1910. His daughter Maud Linder,
in her book Max Linder était mon père 28 and in
my conversations with her, recounted her
sad ‘disappointment’ with Tati, to whom she
had proposed just such a spectacle, carefully
outlining her father’s original production
with the idea that Tati work together with
onscreen sequences of her father in a new
cinema-theatre spectacular.
’Together, we studied its eventual realiza-
tion in considerable detail,’ says Maud Linder.
Poster showing Max with his frequent film acting
partner Jane Renouardt.
‘Then, suddenly, Jacques Tati was uncontact-
able. Some time later, the press announced a
show, conceived and realized by Jacques
Tati, based on his film, Jour de fête. . . . ’ 29
The production’s first half had a set of a
fairground in a village as in the film Jour de
fête (1949), with seamless interactions of
filmed and live action – for example a live
character teaching three filmed ‘students’
(including Tati) on bicycles how to deliver
mail on time; and an onscreen musician (like
Max) hurrying to make it to the theatre on
time – the actions perfectly integrated. It
utilized numerous music-hall/clown talents
around Paris, including the clown Pierre
Etaix whose film beginnings that year owed
something to this exposure. It was an
original and brilliant concept – thanks to its
originator, Max Linder, a name conspicuously
absent from the gushing reviews.30
If Max was not the first to integrate filmed
and ‘live’ actors, he seemed to be, much in the

251

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009 IP address: 147.8.16.124

 manner of his long broken-mirror routine, in
which one actor impersonates the reflection
of another. Created for his film Seven Years’
Bad Luck (US, 1920) it would be adapted by
the Marx Brothers in their film Duck Soup
(1933). A simpler version of the routine had
already appeared in Charles Chaplin’s The
Floorwalker (1916) – and on Greek and Roman
stages two millennia before that.31 But Max’s
ingenious elaboration made it world famous
and ‘his’.
252
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
The Tragic Mask
Max’s subsequent years until his marriage
(1923) and two suicide attempts (1924 and
1925) comprised a decline in mood rather
than in art after 1914. He would make two
attempts to conquer Hollywood, and with the
second (1919–22) more or less succeeded. His
last feature film, Le Roi du cirque (1924), was
even hailed by the US trade journal Variety as
one of the best screen comedies ever,32 but by
then his drift toward self-destruction had be-
gun, even before his marriage in 1923 to the
beautiful Ninette Peters, a generation his
junior. He seems to have become philoso-
phically depressed, with Nietzche among his
preferred authors.
That mood decline after 1914 is dealt with
in the book, Max Linder était mon père (Max
Linder Was My Father) by his daughter, Maud
Linder – born in 1924, and so aged only six-
teen months when her parents died. Maud
Linder has spent much of her life ruminating
on Max’s professional and private lives and,
finally, on the coolly planned double suicide
that destroyed her young mother. She has
produced two feature-length documentaries
– for which the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences (caretaker of Hollywood’s
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 ‘Oscars’) honoured her in Los Angeles in
2005 – and two books that have helped re-
establish Max’s position in the history of
world cinema. To an extent, this is also true
of his theatre career which – except through
historians René Jeanne and Charles Ford and
herself – has been largely ignored.33
Her dual biography, (Max Linder Was My
Father) is as close as reality comes to J. M.
Barrie’s fantasy classic Peter Pan, in which
time ages Wendy (Maud) but never the age-
less moving images of the naughty boy Peter
(Max). Unfortunately, the inner turmoils of
‘joyful Max’ cannot convincingly be tied to
his art – that exercise is easier with Mei
Lanfang – and the decline to an unexplained
death-wish of this ‘man who had everything’
is not clarified by after-the-event ‘findings’
of professional psychologists, such as a Pro-
fessor Bouvet, who, according to the Wash-
ington Post of 13 December 1925, analyzed
the seductive Linder smile thus: ‘It was as if,
in the moment of his greatest merriment, he
was continually haunted by the dread that
some fearsome ghost was about to appear
before his eyes.’
Far better read Andreyev’s He Who Gets
Slapped or contemplate the image below of
Max by cine-clown Pierre Etaix’.34 For Etaix,
despite his dark illustration of Max Linder,
the ‘tragic clown’ notion is false. Clowns, he
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
says, are people who love what they are and
love what they do more than anyone he
knows. And he speaks with some authority,
having performed as a clown for the likes of
Circus Bouglione and Circus Pinder as well
as in clubs and on television since the late
1950s, and as a much-cited spokesman on the
subject. His late wife and circus partner,
Annie Fratellini (1932–97), was the grand-
daughter of Paul, one of the ‘Three Fratellini’
who were last century’s most celebrated
clown trio – and contemporaries of Linder,
Chaplin, and Mei Lanfang.35 Of Linder on
film, Etaix says:
His whole presence is so immediate that I am
incapable of remembering he was the first, before
Charlie Chaplin, before everyone else. His abun-
dance of ideas, the mise en scène, the rhythm, the
performance, the playing expressed with an extra-
ordinary economy of means, everything makes
him present now. He is better than ‘modern’. He is
forever.36
Notes and References
With special thanks to Maud Linder, Hong Kong
University Library, and the late René Jeanne, whose
essay ‘Max Linder et le théâtre’, in Revue de l’Histoire du
Théâtre, April–June 1965, p. 164–77, opened the way.
Images by courtesy of Maud Linder.
1. Forever Enthralled (China, 2008) directed by Chen
Kaige.
2. He Who Gets Slapped, directed by Victor Sjostrom,
was an early MGM production, released in the US in
1924. The star, Lon Chaney, would play another ‘tragic
clown’ in Laugh Clown, Laugh, released four years later.
3. The Washington Post of 13 Dec. 1925 records that,
in summer that year Linder had seen this 1925 remake
by Gabriel d’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby of their 1913
film version of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis?
4. See Charles Ford’s Max Linder, part of the Cinéma
d’aujourd’hui series under Pierre Lherminier for Éditions
Seghers, Paris, 1966.
5. This was Chaplin’s inscription on a photograph of
himself given to Linder after the two men first met in
Los Angeles in 1917, shortly before Linder’s return to
France due to ill health. The two comedians became firm
friends and were to be neighbours in Los Angeles dur-
ing 1919–22, Linder’s second term in Hollywood.
6. The company was founded in 1658. The details
here are drawn from the invaluable annual Almanach des
Spectacles from 1874 to 1913, created by Albert Soubies
and published by Librairie des Bibliophiles of 26 Rue
Racine (’near the Odéon’), Paris. They ‘continue the old
Almanach des Spectacles of 1752 to 1815’.
7. Among its principal male actor-members or
sociétaires were Jean-Sully Mounet (aka M. Mounet-
Sully), a longtime friend and ex-lover of Bernhardt as
253
IP address: 147.8.16.124
 well as a notable Hamlet himself, earlier in the nine-
teenth century; Constant Coquelin, then approaching
retirement, whose definitive Cyrano de Bergerac for the
playwright Emond Rostand was preserved as a frag-
ment in a very early film ‘talkie’; and the popular actor
Charles le Bargy, who would have a strange connection
to Max Linder as the latter’s fencing student.
8. According to René Jeanne in ‘Max Linder et le
théâtre’, in Revue de l’Histoire de Théâtre (April–June
1965), p. 165, the then twenty-year-old Max auditioned
before Louis Leloir, a professor of the Conservatoire as
well as a prominent actor-member of the Comédie-
Française. After hearing Max play a scene from
Théodore de Banville’s Le Fourberies de Nérine, Leloir is
quoted as saying: ‘What do you want me to teach you?
You’re [just] an old ham!’ (’Que voulez-vou que je vous
apprenne. Vous êtes un vieux cabot!’).
9. See ‘Max Linder et le théâtre’, in Revue de l’Histoire
de Théâtre (April–June 1965), p. 165.
10. See the theatre section of Le Figaro on 3 December
1904 for the cast list of Le Crime d’Aix.
11. The details come from the review in Gil Blas
(4 November 1904) for whom, otherwise, ‘the subject is
not very original’.
12. See theatre notes of Le Figaro, 22 July 1902.
13. Situated in Rue de Malté, the Théâtre de la
Republique (established in 1866) would also be known
briefly (e.g., in 1903) as Théâtre Chateau d’Eau. Later it
became the famous music-hall venue, the Alhambra.
14. There was cause for concern. Film shows were
often fatal on a mass scale through exploding projector
fuel or flammable film. The worst such incident had
occurred on 4 May 1897 in Rue Jean-Goujon, when 124
people, mostly women and children from the high end
of Paris society, perished horribly in a fire that con-
sumed an entire Catholic charity bazaar. The cause was
accidental ignition of fuel used for the projector of a film
show located in a corner of the bazaar’s combustible
wooden pavilion, full of drapes and hangings, not to
mention the dresses of the victims, that fed the inferno.
Overseeing the mop-up of a scene including barely
touched bodies with heads burned to a crisp, was Pre-
fect Lepine. According to a reporter from the New York
Times, never in its worst excesses did the old French
Revolution manage to kill so many royalists so quickly.
15. See Jacques-Charles, Cent ans de music-hall (Paris:
Éditions Jeheber, 1956) – one of several books by that
author on French showbusiness. He had a four-year
tenure at the Olympia theatre from 1910 to 1914, twice
presenting Max Linder – filmically in a Saison Max
Linder in the summer of 1913, and in the flesh at a gala
opening of the Olympia’s midnight show, Palais de
Danse, on 11 October 1913.
16. Prince, a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire,
would later become a major film comic for Pathé Frères,
second only to ‘Max’, as the character ‘Rigadin’ – or
‘Whiffles’ in England.
17. Published in Paris by Manzi, Joyant et Cie.
18. Rip later became the most sought-after creator of
French revue for two or three decades. One of his fav-
ourite interpreters would be the great Arletty, famous
internationally for her role in Marcel Carné’s film, Les
Enfants du Paradis (1944).
254
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 01 Dec 2009
19. Leplée was to become the victim of a sensational
murder on 6 April 1936, in his own apartment at 86
Avenue de l’Armée, a few blocks from his nightclub,
Gerny’s, in Rue Pierre-Charron, Paris, close to the
Champs-Elysées. His death nearly ended the career of his
protégée Edith Piaf (he it was who gave her the name
‘Piaf’ or Little Sparrow), whom police suspected of
knowing the killers.
20. Shortly thereafter the Olympia changed hands
with a new management under Jacques-Charles, who
had previously been with the Folies Bergère.
21. According to John Cher’s ‘Parisian Notes’, The
Bioscope, 11 April 1912, p. 111.
22. See John Cher’s ‘Parisian Notes’ in The Bioscope,
6 and 13 June 1912.
23. John Cher, The Bioscope, 13 June 1912, p. 785.
24. Ibid., 16 March 1913, p. 729.
25. See the theatre pages of L’Humanité, 1 September
1913; it praises both sketches in its reviews.
26. Yuri Tsivian’s essay, originally published in the
film history periodical Griffithiana (Italy, May 1994),
reappears, slightly edited, in Silent Film, ed. Richard
Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1996), p. 194–214.
27. See Sergei Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director
(New York: Dover, 1970), p. 145.
28. Maud Linder, Max Linder était mon père (Paris:
Flammarion, 1992).
29. Ibid., p. 198. Maud Linder has said the same
thing in our personal interviews.
30. Maud Linder’s other disappointment – the failure
to acknowledge a source or debt to a master – was with
Charlie Chaplin, whom she tried to meet unsuccessfully
on three occasions because he could have evoked so
many memories of her father. Chaplin’s book, My Auto-
biography (London: Bodley Head, 1964), failed to men-
tion Max even once.
31. I am grateful to Roy Hudd for pointing this out
to me in a personal letter. Mr Hudd, the famous British
comedian, has performed the routine, a long-time staple
of music-hall comedy.
32. See the US trade journal Variety, 25 June 1924,
p. 46, where the reviewer, ‘Gore’, hailed it as ‘without
doubt one of the best comedies ever screened’ after a
private showing in London at the Scala Theatre on 12
June 1924.
33. The films are En Compagnie de Max Linder (In the
Company of Max Linder, 1963) and L’homme au chapeau de
soi (The Man in the Silk Hat, 1983). The books are the pic-
torial Max Linder (Paris: Atlas Éditions) and Max Linder
était mon père (Paris: Flammarion), both published in
1992.
34. Published in Pierre Etaix, La Carton à chapeaux
(Paris: Éditions Gilbert Salachas, 1981).
35. Pierre Etaix shared a film ‘Oscar’ with Jean-
Claude Carrière in 1963 for a pantomime short, Heureux
Anniversaire (France, 1961). He worked as a clown for
the Pinder and Bouglione circuses, and made a film
masterpiece, Yoyo (1964–65), a love letter to the pro-
fession.
36. This is a direct quote from Maud Linder’s book,
but Etaix has said much the same thing to me in inter-
views.
IP address: 147.8.16.124