Max Davidson
MGM publicity photograph, 1927
Born(1875-05-23)May 23, 1875
Berlin, Germany
DiedSeptember 4, 1950(1950-09-04) (aged 75)
Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, US
OccupationActor
Years active1912–45
SpouseAlice Marti (1927 – ?)

Max Davidson (May 23, 1875 – September 4, 1950) was a German-American film actor known for his comedic Jewish persona during the silent film era.[1] With a career spanning over thirty years, Davidson appeared in over 180 films.

Career

Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Davidson emigrated to the United States in the 1890s where he began working in stock theater and vaudeville. He entered silent movies in 1912. He made a series of films featuring the character Izzy for Reliance Pictures Company in 1914. The films included Izzy Gets the Wrong Bottle, Izzy and His Rival, Izzy and the Diamond, How Izzy Stuck to His Post, How Izzy Was Saved, Izzy, the Detective, Izzy's Night Out, Izzy, the Operator, and Izzy and the Bandit.

By the mid-teens, Davidson had appeared in his first feature film, Edward Dillon's Don Quixote (1915), followed by D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, and Tod Browning's Puppets (both 1916).

He starred alongside a young Jackie Coogan in a pair of silent features, The Rag Man (1923) and Old Clothes (1925).[2]

In 1923, he appeared in the Mack Sennett feature The Extra Girl with Mabel Normand, and in 1927 made a rare starring feature at Columbia, Pleasure Before Business, as well as playing a somewhat more serious role as a servant in the Pola Negri WW1 vehicle Hotel Imperial.

In 1926 he began working for Hal Roach, playing stereotypical Jewish comic characters. After being featured in the Mabel Normand comedy Raggedy Rose, Davidson was given a short-subject series of his own, appearing as a woebegone, put-upon fellow in such titles as Jewish-Prudence and Don't Tell Everything. He was also featured in other Hal Roach series, including the "female Laurel and Hardy" shorts co-starring Anita Garvin and Marion Byron. Davidson's best-known starring shorts are Call of the Cuckoo (1927), featuring cameos by Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, and Charley Chase; and the recently revived Pass the Gravy (1928), deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Career decline

Max Davidson's exaggerated Jewish caricature was popular enough with audiences to sustain a string of silent shorts, but the coming of sound gave Davidson a voice. Although Davidson's native German accent was not so thick as to ruin his chances in talking pictures, his dialect gave his screen character a new and potentially offensive dimension, and Hal Roach forestalled any protests by discontinuing the series entirely. Davidson did appear in a few of Roach's earliest talkies, including the Edgar Kennedy short Hurdy Gurdy (1929) and the Our Gang short Moan and Groan, Inc. (1929). But Davidson's established ethnic character was too broad to survive as a starring attraction, and he spent the rest of his career playing bit roles almost exclusively.

Davidson's largest role in sound films was as cowboy Tom Tyler's good-natured Jewish sidekick in the 1936 western feature Roamin' Wild. He was still familiar to the movie-comedy community; when Charlie Chaplin needed ethnic types to portray the residents of a Jewish ghetto in The Great Dictator (1940), Max Davidson was cast. He continued to play ethnic shopkeepers, opposite The Three Stooges in No Census, No Feeling (1940) and The East Side Kids in Clancy Street Boys (1943), among several other films.

His final screen appearance was in the 1945 Clark Gable film Adventure. Davidson died on September 4, 1950, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California.

Partial filmography

Year Title Role Notes
1913 Scenting a Terrible Crime The Superintendent
1914 An Interrupted Séance Landlord
1915 Caught by the Handle Mr. Riche
1916 Sunshine Dad Mystic Seer
1916 Intolerance Neighbor
1916 The Heiress at Coffee Dan's Shorty Olson[3]
1917 A Daughter of the Poor Joe Eastman Alternative titles: The Heart of the Poor
The Spitfire
1917 The Scrub Lady Max and Marie Dressler in the film
1918 The Hun Within Max
1919 The Hoodlum Abram Isaacs
1919 The Mother and the Law The Kindly Neighbor
1921 No Woman Knows Ferdinand Brandeis
1921 The Idle Rich The tailor
1922 Second Hand Rose Abe Rosenstein
1922 Turn to the Right Pawnbroker
1922 Remembrance Georges Cartier
1922 The Right That Failed Michael Callahan
1923 The Ghost Patrol Rapushkin
1923 The Rendezvous Commissar
1923 The Darling of New York Solomon Levinsky
1924 Fools Highway Old Levi
1924 Hold Your Breath Street Merchant
1925 The Rag Man Max Ginsburg
1925 Old Clothes Max Ginsburg
1925 Justice of the Far North Izzy Hawkins
1925 Hogan's Alley Clothier
1926 Raggedy Rose Moe Ginsberg
1927 Hotel Imperial Elias Butterman
1927 Why Girls Say No Papa Whisselberg
1927 Pleasure Before Business Sam Weinberg
1927 Jewish Prudence Papa Gimplewart
1927 Don't Tell Everything
1927 Should Second Husbands Come First?
1927 Flaming Fathers
1927 Call of the Cuckoo Papa Gimplewart
1927 Love 'Em and Feed 'Em
1928 The Boy Friend Papa Davidson
1928 Feed 'Em and Weep Max, restaurant manager
1928 Pass the Gravy The father National Film Registry
1928 Dumb Daddies
1928 Came the Dawn
1929 So This Is College Moe Levine, the tailor
1929 Moan and Groan, Inc. The lunatic
1929 Hurdy Gurdy
1930 The Shrimp Professor Schoenheimer
1931 The Itching Hour
1931 Oh! Oh! Cleopatra Royal musician
1932 Docks of San Francisco Max, Detective
1933 The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble Larsen Uncredited
1934 Straight Is the Way Old clothes man Uncredited
1935 Metropolitan Tailor Uncredited
1936 Roamin' Wild Abe Wineman
1937 The Girl Said No Max Alternative title: With Words and Music
1939 The Great Commandment Old man
1940 The Great Dictator Jewish man Uncredited
1940 Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman Flower man Uncredited
1940 No Census, No Feeling Storekeeper Uncredited
1942 Reap the Wild Wind Juror Uncredited
1945 Adventure Man in library Uncredited

References

  1. ↑ Erens, Patricia (1988). The Jew in American Cinema. Indiana University Press. pp. 92–93. ISBN 978-0-253-20493-6.
  2. ↑ McCaffrey, Donald W.; Jacobs, Christopher P. (1999). Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 102. ISBN 978-0-313-30345-6.
  3. ↑ "The Heiress at Coffee Dan's". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Retrieved November 29, 2014.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Max Davidson.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.