Реферат Max Linder
Max Linder
(1883-1925)
[pic]
Repka Nick form 11 ”B”
Max Linder
(1883-1925)
About Linder
As I have never seen a Max
Linder film, I cannot write anything about him. I have thus
reproduced here two separate articles. Suffice to say, Walter Kerr in
The Silent Clowns (see books page) rates him as a true pioneer of
film comedy (e.g. the joke of being unveiled on a statue used by
Keaton in The Goat and Chaplin in City Lights was first used by
Linder).
b. Gabriel-Maximilien
Leuvielle Dec 16 1883, Caverne, France. d. 1925.
At 17 he left high school to
study drama and soon after began an acting career on the Bordeaux
stage. He moved to Paris in 1904 and started playing supporting parts
in melodramas. In 1905 he embarked upon a parallel career in
Pathe films. For three years he spent his days in the film
studios and his evenings on the stage, using his real name in the
theater and the pseudonym Max Linder on the screen. By 1908 he had
given up the stage to concentrate on his increasingly successful
screen career. By 1910 he was an internationally popular comedian,
possibly the best-known screen comic on either side of the Atlantic
in the years before WW I. Typically playing a dapper dandy of the
idle class, he developed a style of slapstick silent screen comedy
that anticipated Mack Sennett and Chaplin and set the premises of the
genre for years to come. Ferdinand Zecca, Louis Gasnier, and Alberto
Capelani were among the directors of his earliest films.
By 1910, Linder was writing
and supervising, and from 1911 also directing, all his own films. His
popularity was at its peak in 1914, when he was called to arms. Early
in the war he was a victim of gas poisoning and suffered a serious
breakdown. The injury was to have a lasting effect on his physical and
mental well-being. He returned briefly to French films, but
finding his popularity vanishing, he accepted a bid from Essanay and
left for the US late in 1916. Continuous ill health hampered the American
phase of Linder's career from the start. In mid-1917, after
only three films, he was felled by double pneumonia and spent nearly
a year recovering in a Swiss sanitarium. When he returned to the US
in 1921, he formed his own production unit, releasing through United
Artists. But after making only three more American films, including
the celebrated parody (of Fairbanks’ The Three Musketeers) The Three Must-
Get-Theres, he returned to Europe, where he married the
daughter of a Paris restaurateur in 1923. Linder made two more film
appearances: one in France, the other in Austria, but realized his career
was finished. In 1925 he entered a suicide pact with his wife.
Their bodies were discovered side by side in a Paris hotel. He
remained forgotten for years, until the 60s, when many of his old
films began turning up, affording film historians an opportunity to
evaluate his career and his contributions to the evolution of screen
comedy.
Biography from
Quinlan’s Film Comedy Actors
With his foxy brown eyes
matched by a like moustache, cane, elegant cutaway coat, silk cravat,
kid gloves and gleaming top hat, Max Linder could have been every
inch the French boulevardier who “walked along the Bois de
Boulogne with an independent air”--had not, in films, everything
gone wrong for him. Max Linder was France’s first great film
comedian. But not for him any kind of dress that smacked of the
circus clown. Max was always debonair, even in the face of disaster.
His early films in France, of which he made scores, are cameos of
catastrophe, little gems which work a variety of gags on a single
situation, such as taking a bath, getting dressed, or (quite often,
as the wolfish Max pursued his prey) chasing a damsel. He was
enormously popular in the early 1900s. And, had not war intervened,
he would perhaps have been happily entertaining continental audiences
into his sixties, competing with such upstarts as Jacques Tati and
Fernandei. Linder spent the early part of his life in America, where
his father had gone to plant vineyards. When the business failed the
family returned to France and Max completed his education there. He
was a natural athlete (once pole-vault champion of South West
France), an ability that was to stand
