Douglas Fairbanks in Tod Browning's "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916)
25Detective Coke Ennyday (Douglas Fairbanks) is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Ennyday lampoons Holmes' checkered detective hat, clothes and even car, along with the propensity for injecting himself with cocaine, from a bandolier of syringes worn across his chest, and liberally helps himself to the contents of a hatbox-sized round container of white powder labeled "COCAINE" on his desk, whenever he feels momentarily down, then laughing with delight.
A device used for observing visitors, which is referred to in the title cards as his "scientific periscope", bears a close resemblance to a modern closed-circuit television. What is apparently a clock face has "EATS", "DRINKS", "SLEEPS", and "DOPE" instead of numbers.
The police call and ask him to track down a smuggler. Ennyday catches a gang of drug smugglers with a lot of artificial "help." But, he stops them only after sampling their opium.
He also has to save the girl (Bessie Love), who is trapped in a Chinese laundry, which provides more opportunity for the wily detective to get high.
The finale is a burlesque battle between Ennyday and the villain, followed by a coda showing Fairbanks telling the story to a studio scenario editor. The editor, much to Fairbanks' disgust, tells him to stick to acting.
A 1916 American Black & White short silent comedy film directed by John Emerson, produced by D.W. Griffith, story by Tod Browning, intertitles written by Emerson's wife Anita Loos (the pair were Fairbanks' frequent collaborators in the mid-'10s), cinematography by John W. Leezer, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Bessie Love, Alma Rubens, Allan Sears (credited as A.D. Sears), Charles Stevens, Tom Wilson, George Hall, William Lowery, Joe Murphy, and B.F. Zeidman. The villain's car was a 1916 Winton Big Six Touring Car.
The film was initially shot by Christy Cabanne, who was later fired from the production. John Emerson was hired and re-shot the film with the help of Tod Browning. Browning wrote this story for while recovering from serious injuries in a 1915 auto accident. The crash killed his passenger, actor Elmer Booth.
"Coke Ennyday" is a parody of the fictional Professor Craig Kennedy, a scientist-detective at Columbia University. Written by Arthur B. Reeve, the Craig Kennedy short stories were popular at that time, appearing over eighty times in "Cosmopolitan" Magazine.
Filming in Chinatown, the production was attacked by members of the community, because the producers had not requested to film in the neighborhood. Painted on the side of the wagon is "Sum Hop Laundry". A "Hop Head" was slang for a drug user, so that laundryman must have been Some Hop.
The film displays a lighthearted and comic attitude toward the use of cocaine and laudanum, and was released in 1916, the first year after the Harrison Act took effect. Narcotic prohibition was still a new concept in the United States, and the use of opiates and cocaine was much more socially acceptable than today. Furthermore, the censorious Hays Code would not be instituted for another fourteen years after the film's release. With the introduction of the code, depictions of intravenous drug use were not shown in major motion pictures. During the era of the Hays Code, films that dealt with controversial topics such as drug use were morality plays that illustrate the degradation that surrounds the use of such drugs.
This wasn’t be the first silent film to incorporate drug use, although it’s one of the earliest to do it in a “ha ha cocaine dependency lol” sort of way. Drug use was frowned upon and warned against, of course, but the stigma it has today hadn’t quite made it into the public subconscious. One example is the Biograph short "For His Son" (1912), about a doctor who creates a popular soda laced with cocaine, and Charlie Chaplin’s "Easy Street" (1917) included a scene with a dangerous “dope fiend.”
How did this unnatural concoction come into being? Back in the days when theaters frequently offered a whole evenings’ worth of entertainment (comedy short, cartoon, newsreel, short documentary, feature) Triangle theaters were merely packaging their features with Keystone comedies and calling it a day. Exhibitors reported that audiences were looking for more variety, so Triangle decided to create more two-reel comedies, starting with Leaping Fish and enlisting one of their feature film stars, Fairbanks.
If you haven’t seen Fairbanks, the acrobatic leading man, in this unusually broad comedy, a wacky hodgepodge of slapstick and bad taste, never fear, for it is here. While now considered a cult film due its comedic dealings of drug use, Fairbanks hated the film and wanted to have it withdrawn from circulation. This was the second film Fairbanks did with director John Emerson, their first being "His Picture in the Papers" (released in February 1916) which was a hit. This film was a departure for Fairbanks due to the subject matter and the fact that he generally appeared in feature films, not two-reelers.