Max Davidson

 ( 1875 Births ) 

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.

With a career spanning over thirty years, Davidson appeared in over 180 films.

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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).

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.

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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.

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Further reading In 2026, the first monograph dedicated to Davidson's career, The Comic Unveiled: Max Davidson and the Art of Meaningful Laughter by Lorenzo Tremarelli, provided a comprehensive critical re-evaluation of his Roach work, focusing on the philosophical and cultural dimensions of his comedy.

Lorenzo Tremarelli (2026). 9791224059431, Youcanprint. EAN 9791224059431

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Partial filmography

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

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External links

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