The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

[randy_byers]

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?

Comments

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

I find your movie posts fascinating since I have seen very few of these. In college, I rarely went to movies (with a couple of notable exceptions that each lasted a several months), and now, even with the home theatre sort of thing, I watch very few. Silent movies are a whole era of movies of which I have only seen a few dozen, and some of them only in part. What you are writing about is all new to me.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that I wasn't really a movie buff back then, in the era of the repertory theater I saw a fair number of classic movies, both in college and after I moved to Seattle. Then I sort of lost interest in the videotape era, only to get into film much more seriously in the DVD era.

As part of that deeper interest, I started getting into silent film, which I began to see as a distinct art form. It's interesting that it's making a bit of a comeback in contemporary film-making, particularly when you considered that silent films were basically tossed in the trash with the advent of sound. Only a very small percentage of silent films survive today, although some a merely buried in archives around the world.