Seven Years Bad Luck

Max wakes up with very little memory of the night before. The servants have broken his mirror. So that the master will not notice, one of them stands in the empty frame and copies Max's every move: bending, shaving, lifting a hand. For a while Max buys it. When he stops buying it the mirror turns out to be genuinely broken, and he becomes convinced seven years of bad luck are coming. After that, everything he does to escape the bad luck brings him fresh trouble: a train, the police, a jail, his fiancée. Max Linder directs the silent comedy; sixty-two minutes, playing the lead himself. Linder was French cinema's first great comedian, and Chaplin said he had learned from him. The mirror routine has been redone many times since; the best known is the Marx Brothers' version.