That strange sound? That's Nancy Reagan spinning in her grave!

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)
Starring: Douglas Fairbanks, Bessie Love, Alan Sears, Alma Rubens, and Tom Wilson
Directors: John Emerson and Christy Cabbane
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Eccentric detective Coke Ennyday (Fairbanks) turns his drug-fueled genius toward stopping the predations of a fabulously wealthy criminal mastermind (Sears). Along the way, he and a beautiful young woman (Love) take turns saving each other's lives at the sea-shore and romance blossoms... but the villain has plans for Coke's new sweetheart.

As their stars were rising, Douglas Fairbanks and Bessie Love appeared together in a number of films, the wildest of which is almost certainly "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish". While I haven't watched any of the others, but I think I can safely make that assumption, because "wild" is joined with "weird" and "subversive" when one is looking for words to be describe this film.

"The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" is a cartoonish spoof of Sherlock Holmes with an extreme degree of attention paid to Holmes' drug habits. Some of the film's humor is lost through the passage of time, because the exaggerated degree to which Coke Ennyday uses drugs is, according to one commentator, mocking a stage adaptation of Holmes that was well-known and very popular at the time and which had left out all drug references. The vast majority of the drug humor is so over-the-top, however,  that it is as funny and ridiculous now as it was when this film was first released 100 years and will be 100 years from today. Coke Ennyday spends the entire movie buzzing around, high as a kite... and his solution to any obstacle is to inject, snort, or otherwise consume more and more drugs. And it works.

This is Douglas Fairbanks' movie. From the first moment until the end, everything is driven by his insane antics--which get even more insane once he breaks out the comedic Sherlock Holmes outfit. This, being a silent movie, the gags are almost entirely visual, although a few are augmented by intertiles or labels on items, as well as puns like the business that serves as the front for the villain's drug distribution network being named Sum Hop Laundry. While co-star Bessie Love and the lead villain, played by Alan Sears, get some funny scenes together or of their own--mostly revolving around poking fun at the melodramatic conventions of silent movies--and they show themselves to be talented and charismatic performers in these scenes, viewers will be counting the seconds for Fairbanks' unrestrained energy and craziness to return to the screen. (As tempting as it is for me to relay some of the greatest gags in the film by way of enticing people to watch it, doing so would spoil their impact... all I can say is that this is a film that has be experienced cold.)

Although it's over 100 years old, "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" is wilder and "edgier" than many contemporary works. If anything, it's gotten even more risque, what with the "drugs are bad mmmmkay?" messaging of recent decades and several of the conventional plot devices and characters it mocks are the sort of thing that sends certain people running for the fainting couch while clutching their pearls, or for their keyboards to post angrily hysterical messages to social media and blog comment sections. I think those who appreciate absurdist, subversive humor will enjoy the heck out of this movie, even if they don't usually like silent films. The showdown between the drug-crazed, syringe wielding Coke Ennyday and the villains at the Sum Hop Laundry is something any lover of comedies needs to see at least once in their lives! (The sequence where Bessie Love's damsel in distress essentially rescues herself is also a silent movie satirical gold.)

There are several different versions of "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" that can be viewed for free on YouTube and certain streaming services. You can even watch it right now, and I hope you'll let me know with a comment if I steered you right or wrong! (I chose this particular version because I like the music.)


Trivia: A not so funny coincidence/factoid is that Alma Ruben (who plays the villain's female sidekick) was, like Fairbanks and Love, a rising Hollywood star at the time this film was made. In fact, she was more famous than Love at the time... but by 1925, Ruben's life and career was ruined by drug abuse. She died in 1931 from ailments related to her addictions.

This 'Conspiracy' isn't worth uncovering

Conspiracy (1930)
Starring: Bessie Love, Ned Sparks, Hugh Trevor, Gertrude Howard, Rita La Roy, and Donald MacKenzie
Director: Christy Cabanne
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

After killing a drug kingpin, Margaret (Love) is hiding from both the drug syndicate and the police, her identity as the killer still unknown. Then a crime writer turned amateur detective, "Little Nemo" (Sparks), decides to solve the case, gets onto her trail, and may expose her to cops and crooks alike.

When I reviewed "The Sawdust Ring", I said that I could easily see why D.W. Griffith was sure Bessie Love was going to be a star from the moment he first saw her, and why she did indeed become a huge star during the 1920s. In that film, she had a certain charisma that almost seemed to make her leap off the screen. In "Conspiracy", however, very little of that aura is evident... in fact, the performance she gives here barely distinguishes her from a generic "damsel in distress"-type character. (I might even argue that her performance seems a bit off, since she's playing a character who's been undercover with a drug gang for several months. Sure, she's just stabbed someone to death as the film starts, and later she's been cooped up with an obnoxious asshole for two weeks, but I would still expect something more than confusion and panic to each and every situation she encounters.)

Perhaps Love was modulating her performance to be complimentary to the boring, bland stock hero played by Hugh Trevor. Maybe she was trying to be lowkey so Ned Sparks' supremely annoying, grumpy old man character would seem even more annoying and grumpy. Or maybe she knew she was in a badly directed third-rate movie with a weak script full of squandered opportunities and only one mildly interesting twist, and she wasn't giving it her all. Whatever the reason, there are only two times in "Conspiracy" where we see glimmers of the Love that graced the screen 15 years earlier: During the obligatory insta-romance-sparking scene where she tells her tale of woe to Trevor's dull alleged man of action, and during the scene where Sparks' character threatens to turn her over to the police, and she in turn threatens to bash his brains in with a paperweight.

Still, even if Love had given the performance of her career, she probably couldn't have saved this movie which leads with its very best scenes and then steadily goes down hill. The biggest problem here, really, is that the filmmakers couldn't decide if they were making a comedy or a thriller or a melodrama; or if the central character was Margaret, Love's caught-in-the-middle woman on the run; Little Nemo, Sparks' annoying and obnoxious and played-strictly-for-laughs crime writer; or Trevor's boring feature section reporter. It also doesn't help the movie that anything remotely suspenseful happens off-screen or in a flashback (where we already know the outcome).

As terrible as this movie is, and as disappointed as I was with Bessie Love's performance, I did keep watching. Ned Sparks as Little Nemo was entertaining in a train-wreck sort of way... and I watched with captivated awe while Sparks and Gertrude Howard (as Little Nemo's beleaguered black housekeeper) played through a series of comedic (but extremely unfunny) and deeply racist exchanges. Also, Rita La Roy's femme fatal-ish character that shows up at about the halfway point as an agent of the drug ring trying to milk Little Nemo for information and seduce him into turning Margaret over to the gang when he finds her, was a lot of fun.

Unless you're a huge Ned Sparks fan (I think this was the closest this accomplished character actor ever came to playing the lead); want an opportunity to be able to tell exactly how brilliant Bessie Love is in some of her other roles; or are looking for an old movie with some racists scenes to fill you with righteous outrage, there are far better movies to spend your time on. (But if you do decide to check it out, I recommend you watch it for free on YouTube.)