Max and the Lady Doctor

I believe the 1912 date on this film is incorrect and it was actually made in 1909. This would be according to the information provided on the documentary of Max Linder's life by his surviving daughter.

The film itself is adorable. Max visits a lady doctor for a chest cold and is alternately anxious and nervous and excited, in a romantic and sexual way, depicted by his clever pantomime. One can easily see his techniques were stolen by Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, etc. Max proposes to the doctor, she accepts, and the next scene you see them married. Max brings their baby to the office waiting room, where several good looking men are waiting to be seen by his wife. Max peeks in and sees his wife with her ear against a patient's back and he goes nuts, hands the baby to one of the men in the waiting room, and rushes into the examining room and kicks the patient out. Then each remaining patient gets the same treatment. Lastly we see Max in happy domestic contentment, at home with his wife and baby. It is obvious the message is that he will take care of her from now on and she won't have to work. Or at least, that's what I took from it. The film ends rather abruptly, but it is definitely a cute one.

In "Max Et La Doctoresse" (1909) Herr Max loves secretly a young and natürlich!!, attractive frau doktor but he doesn't know quite how to approach her so he pretends to be a patient in order to be treated by her. After undergoing the usual exhaustive medical exam typical of the movies (She takes his pulse and gently touches his stomach) Herr Max achieves his innermost desire and frau doktor and patient fall in love. This results however in a serious side effect: marriage.

However, on their wedding night and before any joyful consummation, Frau Linder receives an urgent call from one of her sick patients. She rushes off leaving her spouse feverish with desire. But even worse, the same situation occurs a second time just a little later. Herr Max soon discovers that his original clever plan to court the pretty doktor is being copied by others: potential rivals swamp the doktor's office on the pretext of needing a physical. A frenzied Max takes drastic action and hurls them all out.

This funny one-reel programme was screened at the Schloss theatre during the last soirée, a wonderful night in which it was made obvious why Herr Max Linder was one of the best comedians in the history of the cinema and truly an inspiration for Herr Charles Chaplin.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count has an appointment with the aristocratic family physician.

The confusion over dates seems to come about because there were two different films (neither dated 1909). Le Mari et la doctoresse was made in 1907 and Max et la doctoresse (this film) in 1914. Both may have starred Linder although there is no certainty about the earlier film.

In between the two (1911), Georges Monca also made La Doctoresse with Charles Prince (whose "Rigadin" series commenced the following year so that this films is sometimes given the title Rigadin et la doctoresse).

What is clear from the catalogue description of the 1909 film is that the second two films are not just remakes of the first but, in some sense responses, to it.

All three films are strongly anti-feminist along much the same lines as Alice Guy's Les Résultats du féminisme of 1906 where men relegated to the house by career wives, rebel against the indignity of being left to look after babies. Guy made what sounds from the surviving review - the film is lost - like a rather different version in the US in 1912 - In the Year 2000 - and some have imagined, although there is no real evidence, that it was Gaumont himself who was responsible for the strongly anti-feminist slant of the original film.

The 1909 film treats the subject with a certain irony. The husband does try to rebel (as in the Guy film and does (as here) get jealous, but, in Le Mari et la doctoresse, the woman-doctor is made of sterner stuff and it is the rebellious husband who gets kicked out of the house not her male patient of whom he is jealous. The film ends, not with domestic bliss restored but with the subdued husband being given a great basketful of socks to darn, ruefully musing "If only I had known!" ("Ah, si j'avais su !"). The moral is still, by implication, anti-feminist but it is not (as in the other films) the man who wins the day.

The 1911 film was written by two well-known dramatists and the husband responds to the problem of his wife's neglect, on the advice of his friend, by philandering. In this case it is she, not he, who is jealous, and she abandons her profession to save her marriage.

The 1914 film is more similar to that of 1909 in that, as with the various men in Guy's film, the heroes in both cases find themselves left, quite literally, holding the baby. Only the ending is different. If Linder did play the part of the husband in both films, then the changed perspective is very interesting. A superstar in 1914 (as he was not in 1907 and could easily have appeared uncredited in the earlier film), Max may have felt the need to recast himself in a more virile mode.

There may have been more personal reasons still, now that Linder was writing and directing his own films for altering the outcome of the film. Ten years later it would be Linder's tendency to morbid jealousy that would end not only his career but his life and that of his teenage wife.

For a serious and powerful film about a woman-doctor see Pyotr Chardynin's A Woman of Tomorrow which also came out in 1914 and is one of the best films of that year. This is not quite the "feminist" film it is sometimes made out to be; indeed there is a sense in which its conclusion has common ground with the anti-feminist comedies. But it is very definitely not anti-feminist and presents the situation of the busy and successful career-woman as a genuine and serious dilemma.