In Popular Culture
- Maxim's is featured in both Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) and the subsequent The Merry Widow ballet.
- Georges Feydeau's play named La Dame de Chez Maxim (The Girl from Maxim's, 1899) which was adapted into a film The Girl from Maxim's directed by Alexander Korda in 1933.
- A popular Parisian urban myth claims that Ho Chi Minh worked at Maxim's as a busboy and waiter when he was living as an exile in Paris in the early 1920s.
- The restaurant is mentioned several times in Jean Renoir's 1937 film Grand Illusion.
- Maxim's was also featured in the movie Gigi featuring French actors Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan. The story focused on the effort of two older women to train Gigi, the granddaughter of one and grandniece of the other, to become a courtesan. The movie is set during the Belle Époque.
- Maxim's is mentioned in the 1979 Doctor Who serial City of Death.
- Maxim's is mentioned in the 1970s British television sitcom Fawlty Towers. Faced with a food inspection, Chef says to Basil Fawlty, "Have you ever read George Orwell's experiences at Maxim's in Paris?" Fawlty retorts, "No, do you have a copy? I'll read it out in court!" Chef is referring to Orwell's 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London, which gives gruesome details of Orwell's work as a dishwasher in the filthy kitchen of the hotel.
- Maxim's is mentioned in the short story "The Secret of Lieutenant Villar" from the collection Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903) by British thriller writer William Le Queux.
- Maxim's is briefly mentioned in both Ian Fleming's From A View To A Kill and The Man with the Golden Gun.
- The exterior of the restaurant is featured in The Night of the Generals. O'Toole's character (General Tanz) described it as "An adequate restaurant, very clean."
- Mentioned in the Ivor Novello song "And Her Mother Came Too" which is performed by Jeremy Northam in the Robert Altman film Gosford Park.
- Appeared as a location in the 1981 Danish comedy The Olsen Gang Long Gone, in which three Danish criminals steal a red suitcase from one of the customers by diverting people's attention, switching the cook's famous Sauce Impériale with a typical Danish one, causing everybody to get sick.
- Prominently featured in the 2009 film Chéri.
- An extended sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds takes place in Maxim's.
- Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard's characters travel back in time to the Belle Époque and have dinner together at Maxim's in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
Read more about this topic: Maxim's Paris
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)