Tag: The Marx Brothers

Rapid Response: Seven Years Bad Luck

Roger Ebert has a trivia question to test if you are worthy of telling him a piece of movie trivia: “Who was the third great silent clown?” The correct answer is Harold Lloyd, he following both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But there’s a fourth. Maybe he’s not a “great” silent clown, but he was an important and famous figure in his time, France’s Max Linder.

I first heard Max Linder’s name thanks to Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds.” If you haven’t seen a film of his, it’s not your fault. Of hundreds of shorts and a handful of features, not even a hundred survive and practically a dozen are even available for viewing. He came from a French vaudeville background and began acting in 1905, actually predating Chaplin and earning him the title of “The Professor” by Chaplin himself. He never achieved fame in America, but otherwise he was a global star. World War I and illnesses hampered his career, and he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925, never knowing the pain of irrelevancy after the silent era.

Now one of his most well known films is “Seven Years Bad Luck,” where he plays a man trying to avoid bad luck after he shatters a mirror, only finding bad luck in the process.

If Chaplin was a lovable and innocent tramp, Keaton was a stone faced clown and Lloyd was a headstrong everyman, then Linder must have been the movie star of the bunch.

Linder’s character was a sociable, wealthy gentleman aptly named Max, and Linder himself was way better looking than the lot of his silent companions. He has a look that makes him resemble a grizzled Clark Gable or even Johnny Depp at times. He looks the part, whereas Chaplin and Keaton were flawless aliens and Lloyd was just lucky to be there.

But what’s more, Linder often plays the straight man in all of his gags. Rather than perform stunts and prat falls, Linder is just unassuming and unlucky. He gets in trouble with his girlfriend when he transforms her living room into a surreptitious dance hall for her servants, blindly plunking away at the piano with his back turned not realizing how much trouble he’s about to get into.

He’s an exuberant and natural presence, and if he’s not as physically talented as his silent clown peers, he can arrange the camera in such a way that the payoff is the same. In one scene, Max (a fairly short guy) hides behind a burly giant to sneak onto a train, walking carefully in his stride and giving the audience a perspective that prevents us from seeing him as well. Another director would just have its audience assume the train conductor couldn’t tell where he was hiding.

Linder also recycles gags from his vaudeville roots, but he imbues his own unique style and punchline into each one. The famous example from this film is an opening mirror gag. Most will recognize it as strikingly similar to the routine performed by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” One man pretends to be the other man’s reflection in a broken stand-up mirror, and the other suspiciously tries to test if he’s actually seeing himself. Something like this could only end one way, but Linder makes it special. He starts to shave in front of the mirror and lather himself with shaving cream. His reflection doesn’t have any cream in the jar beside him, so Linder assumes that, like his reflection, there’s nothing on his brush.

Another age old gag sees Linder get glue on his hand and be unable to let go of anything he touches. Hats, paper, doorknobs. These are all the usual beats such a gag can go through, but perhaps only a director from overseas would be bold enough to make it risque in the way Linder does, latching his hand onto a woman’s blouse until her entire dress pulls off as she tries to escape.

No one trying to get into silent comedy should start here. Linder does not have the pathos of Chaplin or the stunts of Keaton, but he does display roots that reveal how influential and enjoyable he once was.

TV and movies living in the past still make mark on the future

Leave it to the blogosphere to blow yet another writer’s attention grabbing conversation starter of an article way out of proportion.

Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon wrote a fairly well reasoned piece entitled “Will future generations understand ‘The Simpsons’?” and many writers that he later quoted in a follow-up post made equally valid arguments that he was either correct with an asterisk or simply wrong.

Most people were particularly shocked that he chose to target such a legacy show like “The Simpsons” and an episode of the show, “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” known to be one of their finest (it made my list of 20 last week). But he picked a single joke and failed in analyzing its immense level of pop cultural depth to his young child, which prompted him to question how anyone under 25 could possibly appreciate how in-tuned with the time period the episode was.

One of Zoller Seitz’s bullet points included that it is impossible to re-live certain moments in pop culture history, like to know how big a deal it was to see Johnny Carson leaving, or how it is whenever someone mentions Charlie Sheen now.

And while some of Zoller Seitz’s critics were a bit snarky at his initial column, their arguments were just as pointed. For instance, “The Simpsons” and many other shows are not for kids like the one he was watching with, comedies should not all strive to be timeless at the risk of sacrificing comedy now, absolutely everything begins to date itself, the best pop culture gags have something else going for them, and most obscure references can be understood with Google anyway.

There are only so many TV shows dated enough to test this theory (“Seinfeld” and a lack of the Internet, smart phones and text messaging is a fantastic example though). But movies as it turns out can be just as much relics of popular culture that found their prime in their day but hold up just as well today.

Movies may not share the super timely quality of scripted TV, nor the serial programming that can enough create footnote television across episodes and seasons, but they capture moments in history just as well.

If only Zoller Sietz was writing back when the Marx Brothers were around. A number of Groucho’s one-liners are an exercise in obscurity. In “A Night at the Opera” during the famous contract scene, the dialogue between Groucho and Chico goes, “Don’t you know what duplicates are? Sure, those five kids in Canada.” Type that line into Google and you’ll get the page for the Dionne quintuplets, a group of babies once famous in 1934 but no longer. But the line of dialogue still works because the Marx Brothers deliver it with such perfect timing and charm.

There’s also Cary Grant thinking the character Bruce in “His Girl Friday” looks a lot like Ralph Bellamy, Preston Sturges parodying all of Hollywood in “Sullivan’s Travels,” Woody Allen trotting out Marshall Mcluhan from behind that stand-up in “Annie Hall,” the religious pamphlet distributors in “Airplane,” the entire ‘80s music landscape in “This is Spinal Tap” and Paul Rudd calling Seth Rogen gay for liking Coldplay in “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”

I don’t intend to harp on Zoller Seitz’s very strong points about “The Simpsons” any more than any other writer, but it’s a scary thought believing that the shows and movies we love today may fly over the heads of future generations.

With any luck, some 2011 parody video will show people 20 years from now exactly how much we hate Rebecca Black today.