Max Davidson
Max Davidson (* May 23, 1875 in Berlin, German Reich, † September 4, 1950 in Woodland Hills, California ) was an American film actor, who has worked in around 200 films. In the 1920s, he had a brief career as a star comedian.
Life
The German Jew Max Davidson emigrated in the 1890s in the United States, where he appeared in vaudeville. In the film, he received not later than 1912 employment as a bit player. Until the mid- 1910s he played in Komic Pictures Company, often under the multi- filmmaker Edward Dillon and beside the performers Fay Tincher and Bobby Ray. In 1914, Davidson embodied in several films, now lost, the Jewish figure Izzy. With intense facial expression he also specialized in the following to such figures. A wide audience he was known in 1925 in the role of the Jewish rag-picker in the Jackie Coogan movies The Rag Man and his successor Old Clothes.
After this success, the producer Hal Roach signed him in whose studio in the years 1927 and 1928 a total of 18 short silent film comedies with Max Davidson emerged as a leading man. Add to Leo McCarey, Clyde Bruckman or Fred Guiol films shot Davidson embodied an overgrown Jewish father who, in desperate attempts to uphold the tradition is not always the situation. Among his typical gestures were a skeptical crawl the beard and a horrified clapping his hand against her cheek. The most important supporting actor in the short films of the comedian was the most occupied as idiotic son Spec O'Donnell, while the rebellious daughter was played in most of the films obtained by Martha Sleeper.
In Call of the Cuckoo (1927 ) Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase and James Finlayson occurred on the Davidson side. The running gag of the film Flaming Fathers ( 1927), in which the protagonist is constantly causing crowds, was of its director Laurel for the Laurel and Hardy short film Putting Pants on Philip (1927 ) assumed (which came earlier in the cinemas, but was filmed later). As most successful of the most above-average Max Davidson comedies is widely Pass the Gravy ( 1928), which consists largely of a dining table scene where the Davidson family must come up with a desperate diversionary tactic so that their guest does not notice that he just eaten his valuable award-winning cock.
Due to the overwhelming success of the duo Laurel & Hardy says producer Roach soon concentrated on these two as well as the perennial favorite The Little Rascals and set the Max Davidson series after two years again. Until the mid- 1940s Davidson was then still working as a side and a small actor, mainly without finding mention in the credits.
Filmography (selection)
Silent films
Max Davidson series at Hal Roach
Many of these silent short film comedies are considered only in fragments obtained ( *) or lost (**).