Le pendu is a French silent short film directed by Louis J. Gasnier and distributed in English-speaking countries under the titles The Man Who Hanged Himself and Attempted Suicide.

[1] Max comes courting a young lady with flowers; she likes him, but the parents send him away.

[3] The projectionist, who hand-cranked the projector, adapted the speed of the film to remain synchronous with the song.

The two riders, the gendarme and the boy enter running in, look at the man hanging from the tree, still feebly moving, and exit again.

A group of villagers led by the commissioner and followed by the gendarmes runs past the camera and exit left.

The girl seen in 1 enters with her parents, she kneels by the body crying while a gendarme cuts the rope in pieces that he gives to the attendants as good luck charm.

[8] On the other hand, Claudia Luna wrote that "despite the fact that Linder is the main protagonist, his acting, apart from the opening scene, is limited to swinging from a branch."

[9] Richard Abel mentions Le pendu as example of one of Max Linder's films based on songs.

[11] He also notes that the film "uses sustained alteration to accentuate the comic process of Max's suicide attempt, as people notice him hanging but seek a higher authority to rescue him.

[12] The very black humour of the film has been stressed by one author: "Max actually succeeds in the somber act, or at least very nearly so.

For minutes hanging lifelessly beneath a branch with a shattered look on his face, he is finally rescued by police in the upmost nick of time.

Unlike the later comic suicide attempts by Harold Lloyd in Haunted Spooks (1920) and Buster Keaton in Hard Luck (1921), the act is here performed nearly dead-serious, with zero gags to make up for it, and thus our distance to the execution remains arguably too slight for us to laugh at it.