The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)

Runtime: 26 minutes

Directed by: John Emerson/Christy Cabanne

Starring: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Bessie Love, Allan Sears, Tom Wilson, Alma Rubens

From: Triangle Film Corporation

Even the silent era featured some bonkers cinema. For awhile I’ve known of this oddity due to someone I follow on Letterboxd. Get this, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. portrays a master detective known as… COKE ENNYDAY. This same person says the name is based on a famous fictional detective at the time known as Craig Kennedy. While never reading any of the Sherlock Holmes story, through cultural osmosis I do know that Holmes ingested some white lines.

Indeed, this short 26 minutes in length concerns Coke’s love of the white pony. Lest you think I exaggerate, there’s a giant tin on his desk labeled COCAINE on the side and one of the four words on his clock says DOPE. He injects the substance into his hand. Why Coke has an assistance who wears what looks like a black studded outfit… beats me! Ennyday believes in a checkerboard aesthetic, from clothing to his jalopy vehicle. The villain is a drug runner and the “leaping fish” is the name of air mattresses that are ridden on the water by the town’s beach.

The film is more “weird” than “great” or “funny”, although there are occasional laughs. What for certain wasn’t funny: the villain had Chinese henchmen (yes, it was yellowface) who were referred to as an anti-Japanese slur I won’t repeat here; sigh… be that as it may, “injecting drugs into your opposition” to defeat them was a first for me. Tod Browning (!) wrote but did not direct this bizarre tale. It wasn’t the most dignified way for me to see Fairbanks, Sr. in a starring role-and he later proclaimed how much he hated the film-but if nothing else, a review of a silent where the hero is a drug-abusing madman will raise some eyebrows.