Max reprend sa liberté

By our standards, it's old fashioned and clichéd.

Well, yeah! It was made in 1912, and was new fashioned then.

It became the basis for much comedy that followed. Major stars such as Charles Chaplin credited Max Linder as their inspiration.

He was an elegant clown, wearing tailored suits but doing some of the things the baggy-pants comics would copy later.

"Grass Widower," or "Grasswidower," created the cliché of the bumbling man trying to survive in what was considered the woman's world. He did it well.

This is a must-see bit of cinema history. You'll want to see it for the history, and you'll want to see it to laugh at the last scene.

The man, his wife, and his mother-in-law are identified here at IMDb, but there are other characters and I hope some day historians will be able to identify them, too.

Much confusion has been caused by a wrong posting on youtube. The description and all the reviews here are of a different film, a very early Linder (before ever the character of "Max" was established and before Linder wrote his own material) called Vive la vie de garçon (Troubles of a Grass Widower in the English language version) dating from 1908. It is a mild but very conventional comedy. The film was remade by Linder in 1912 as Max reprend sa liberté (Max and the Fowl in English although it may also have sometimes been titled Troubles of a Grasswidower). There is at least one correctly titled copy now on youtube.

It is still not a wonderful but it is more "Max" and more quirky. First of all it is not a neglected wife in this version but a disliked wife whom Max has married solely for her money and it is he who forces an argument on her that ceases her to leave. We do not see any of the routine business of the struggling bachelor that comes in the early film but just a bizarre scene where Max tries to kill a chicken by shooting it which leads to some quite surreal havoc! The wife does not return spontaneously at this point but Max writes to her, pleading with her to return not so much because he is alone and helpless but because he is alone and POOR and the wife has closed her bank account to him. But there is then a further rather savage twist. The wife does duly hurry back but, in the meantime, Max has had news of an inheritance and no longer needs her or her money so just kicks her out again.......

So it is really a rather dark, cynical comedy which could be regarded as a realistic (and machistic) correction by Max of the early conventional sentimental piece.

I have suggested in my review of Max and the Doctoresse (1914) that this film too may have been a more "virile" anti-feminist version of an earlier film of 1907 in which Max may also have played. Max was a formidable talent but not altogether a nice character.....

This is a Max Linder short, a domestic comedy about a man trying to fend for himself when his wife returns to her mother. It's the "Mr. Mom" of silent films. It's the sort of thing Chaplin and Keaton would do later on with better results.

The film is divided into segments titled: Household Troubles, Washing Dishes, The Market, House Cleaning, Where Is That Tie? All of them lead to explosive mishaps with the house turned upside down for the final segment as he wakes up in the morning and searches for his missing tie. His wife and mother-in-law arrive at the finale and find him in a state of panic and the house a mess.

Despite all the effort that obviously went into making this short--and all the destruction--the whole plot is taken to the extreme with the overdone slapstick.

This can't be one of Linder's best, but at least it survived pretty much intact while most of his short films have been lost.

Trouble of a Grasswidower (1908)

** (out of 4)

A wife gets tired of her husband (Max Linder) not paying any attention to her so she moves back in with her mother. The husband thinks this is a blessing until he has to do the cooking, cleaning and shopping. This is a pretty bland short and even at 10 minutes this thing seems to drag on way too long. There are a lot of site gags but none of them made me laugh.

Max Takes a Picture (1913)

** (out of 4)

Max Linder takes his wife to the beach hoping to get a picture of her swimming but she plays a prank and him and pretends to drown. Once again, I really didn't laugh at anything here, although the story involving the drowning was a nice touch.

Whether the ACTUAL date of this film's release was 1912 or 1908 or whatever, this silent short is pretty amazing for the time. That's because most short comedies made at the time were almost plot less and pointless. While die-hard fans of Chaplin might disagree, his early shorts are often unwatchably bad when seen today because they had no script--he was just told to ad-lib and be funny! And, occasionally he was, though more often the films seemed flat and showed none of his later genius. However, before Chaplin and even before Fatty Arbuckle, Max Linder was making shorts that were more similar to the later shorts of Arbuckle and Chaplin (circa 1916 or later) in that they had more well-defined plot and consisted of more than just people hitting and throwing stuff at each other.

This film is such an example of a REAL plot and not just pointless slapstick. Max and his wife have a fight and she runs off to her mother's house--leaving Max to fend for himself. And, when it comes to cooking, making the bed and finding his clothing, he is a total wreck--as you see during most of the film. The pacing is slower and gentler with less low-brow laughs--but a more sophisticated charactization that really impressed me for the era.

While compared to later films by Lloyd and Keaton and Chaplin this isn't that great a short, for its time it was terrific AND his success and style led to these other comedians. So give 'em a 9 for originality, pacing and a real plot!