Max Davidson

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Max Davidson (born May 23, 1875 in Berlin , German Reich , † September 4, 1950 in Woodland Hills , California ) was an American film actor who appeared in around 200 films. In the 1920s he experienced a brief career as a celebrity comedian.

Life

The German Jew Max Davidson emigrated to the USA in the 1890s, where he performed in vaudeville . In 1912 at the latest he was employed as a small actor in film . Until the mid-1910s he played for the Komic Pictures Company, often under the frequent filmmaker Edward Dillon and alongside the actors Fay Tincher and Bobby Ray . As early as 1914, Davidson played the Jewish character Izzy in several now- lost films . With intensive facial expressions, he also specialized in such figures in the following. He became known to a wide audience in 1925 in the role of the Jewish rag collector in the Jackie Coogan films The Rag Man and its successor, Old Clothes .

After this success, the producer Hal Roach signed him, in whose studios a total of 18 silent short film comedies with Max Davidson as the leading actor were made in 1927 and 1928. In the films made by Leo McCarey , Clyde Bruckman or Fred Guiol , Davidson played an overgrown Jewish family man who, in desperate attempts to uphold tradition, is not always in control of the situation. His typical gestures included a skeptical rub against his beard and a horrified clap of his hand against his cheek. The main supporting actor in the comedian's short films was Spec O'Donnell , who was mostly cast as an idiotic son , while the rebellious daughter was played by Martha Sleeper in most of the surviving films .

In Call of the Cuckoo (1927) Stan Laurel , Oliver Hardy , Charley Chase and James Finlayson appeared alongside Davidson. The running gag of the film Flaming Fathers (1927), in which the protagonist constantly causes crowds, was taken over by its director Laurel for the Laurel-and-Hardy short film Putting Pants On Philip (1927) (which was released earlier, but was shot later). The most successful of the mostly above-average Max Davidson comedies is widely considered to be Pass the Gravy (1928), which largely consists of a dining table scene in which the Davidson family has to come up with desperate diversionary maneuvers so that their guest does not notice he's just eating his precious, award-winning rooster.

Due to the overwhelming success of the Laurel & Hardy duo , producer Roach soon concentrated on these two and the long-running Die kleine Rolche and discontinued the Max Davidson series after two years. Until the mid-1940s, Davidson then found work as a supporting and small actor, mostly without being mentioned in the credits .

Filmography (selection)

Silent films
  • 1915: Don Quixote
  • 1916: intolerance
  • 1918: The Hun Within
  • 1919: The Hoodlum
  • 1921: No Woman Knows
  • 1923: The Extra Girl
  • 1923: The Darling of New York
  • 1925: The Rag Man
  • 1925: Old Clothes
  • 1926: Get 'Em Young
  • 1927: Anything Once!
  • 1927: My Best Girl
Max Davidson range at Hal Roach (complete)

Many of these silent short film comedies are considered to have only survived in fragments (*) or lost (**).

  • 1927: The Disobedient Daughter (Why Girls Say No)
  • 1927: Jewish Prudence
  • 1927: Don't Tell Everything
  • 1927: What Every Iceman Knows **
  • 1927: The House of a Thousand Joys (Call of the Cuckoo)
  • 1927: Should Second Husbands Come First?
  • 1927: Love 'Em and Feed' Em *
  • 1927: Fighting Fathers **
  • 1927: Flaming Fathers
  • 1928: And a proud rooster too (Pass the Gravy)
  • 1928: Dumb Daddies *
  • 1928: Came the Dawn *
  • 1928: Blow by Blow **
  • 1928: Tell It to the Judge **
  • 1928: Should Women Drive? **
  • 1928: That Night **
  • 1928: Do Gentlemen Snore? **
  • 1928: The Boy Friend
Sound films

Web links