The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

When I was in college, this short silent comedy was a favorite at the local repertory theater. All the college kids loved it because of the drug humor. Douglas Fairbanks plays a scientific detective called Coke Ennyday -- a clear parody of Sherlock Holmes and his seven percent solution. Now the film is available on a new collection from Flicker Alley called Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer, which gathers eleven movies (mostly comedies) that Fairbanks made before he became a swashbuckling hero in the '20s -- although it does include his first swashbuckling hit, The Mark of Zorro (1920).

This was my first chance to see "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" since college days. It holds up pretty well as a cult item with a very goofy take on drugs. We first see Coke Ennyday shooting up every 30 seconds with a syringe poke to the wrist, which causes him to perk up, grin, and twirl his mustache happily. He is called upon to solve a mystery: a gangster is smuggling heroin into the city, but the cops can't figure out how. Ennyday heads down the beach, where silly huggermuggery involving ridiculous disguises and blow-up fish ensues in the surf and on the wharf. As the liner notes point out, the film seems unaware of the irony of a cokehead trying to shut down a drug smuggling ring. The story doesn't really matter, however, and what it's really about is Fairbanks' manic physical antics. This reaches a peak when he ingests several finger scoops of opium, which causes him to start juddering and prancing around the sets like, well, a hopped up slapstick comedian. The drugs are smuggled via a Chinese laundry called, in an awful pun, Sum Hop. Ennyday actually uses drugs to subdue the bad guys too, blowing clouds of coke into the faces of the menacing gang, which knocks them out. The drugs are his superpower.

It's all very silly and slapstick. Fairbanks apparently disavowed it once he became an established, family-friendly star. One can only imagine that it was a huge hit amongst the debauched members of the new Hollywood Babylon -- released the same year as Intolerance and its epic Babylon sets. One of the other interesting tidbits about this movie is that the scenario was by Tod Browning, who would later establish himself as a director of macabre hits like The Unknown (1927), Dracula (1931), and Freaks (1932). Anybody else see this in their college days?

Quaaaaaaaaack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A tough, seesaw game, but the University of Oregon comes from behind to defeat Oklahoma State University 42 to 31 in the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl. University of Oregon's symbol is an O, which of course stands for Obama, so they were obviously destined to win this year. Should've been a national championship, I suppose. Well, a good o-men for University of Oklahoma, perhaps.