After his raucous bachelor party, Max (Max Linder) comes home very drunk the next morning. He’s so drunk he doesn’t even recognize his own bedroom. The next morning, his butler accidentally breaks Max’s mirror while flirting with the maid and tries to pretend nothing happened, even going as far as to convince another house employee to dress up as Max and stand on the other side of the mirror and mimic him while he gets ready until the mirror can be replaced. It doesn’t take Max long to realize what’s going on and make him want to destroy the illusion. But then his fiance Betty (Alta Allen) calls and interrupts him and while he’s away, the mirror is replaced. So when he comes back to throw something through the mirror frame, he ends up breaking the mirror.
Max is a bit superstitious, so the thought of starting seven years of bad luck just before his wedding horrifies him. He does everything he can to avoid bad luck. When he goes to see Betty, her maid offers to read his palm for him while he waits for her and she tells him he’ll have bad luck with a dog. Since Betty has a dog, Max tries to get rid of it and Betty isn’t pleased and breaks things off with him. She changes her mind, but Max’s behavior once again bothers her and she ends it with him again. Desperate to save their relationship, Max gets his friend to talk to Betty on his behalf, but his friend has been in love with Betty and tells her that Max has run off one of his old girlfriends. Deeply hurt, she decides to marry Max’s friend out of spite.
When Max finds out what’s been going on, he decides to get away from it all with a train trip. But he gets robbed before he can get on the train and tries to sneak on. His presence doesn’t go unnoticed by the train conductor and Max has to spend the trip trying to evade the train employees. Eventually he’s arrested and has to see a judge, but it just so happens Betty and Max’s friend are there to see the same judge to get married. But is Max’s streak of bad luck over?
Out of all the silent film comedians, I’ve long felt like Max Linder has been overdue for rediscovery by classic film fans. He was a tremendous influence on so many of the great classic comedians like Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers and Seven Years Bad Luck is an excellent example of how brilliant he was. The whole scene with Max’s employee trying to be the mirror image of Max was clearly an inspiration for Groucho and Harpo’s famous mirror scene in Duck Soup. Even though it’s a slapstick comedy, Linder does a fantastic job of handling everything with style and grace. Seven Years Bad Luck is not the broad, over the top style of slapstick that something like Tillie’s Punctured Romance is. It’s a very fun and clever little comedy that I’ll admit kind of starts to drag a little bit near the end, but is still highly enjoyable.
