THE MYSTERY OF THE LEAPING FISH (1916)

I don't know enough early films to say whether The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is the first American drug comedy film, so let's make a more modest claim: John Emerson's two-reeler, conceived by that beloved humorist of the cinema, Tod Browning, is the Birth of a Nation of drug comedies. I suppose we could be more modest still and call it the Inherent Vice of 100 years ago. It's almost certainly the weirdest performance ever given by Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who plays the "scientific detective" Coke Ennyday. While the name is a loose play on Arthur B. Reeve's then-popular scientific detective Craig Kennedy, the character's awesome drug habit is taken from Sherlock Holmes, and expanded upon immensely. The great detective sits at his desk, injecting himself with something every couple of minutes to restore his spirits -- he chuckles after each injection -- while a huge jar labeled COCAINE is within easy reach. A closet holds the detective's many disguises, clearly labeled as such, while a clock divides Ennyday's routine into four phases: drinks, eats, sleep and dope. This film was made two years after the federal government first cracked down on the distribution of cocaine and other narcotics, so Leaping Fish flies in the face of a national anti-drug hysteria in the admirably irreverent fashion of that era's films. A police chief, I.M. Keen, rings Ennyday's doorbell, and the slightly paranoid scientific detective pulls out his "scientific periscope," a proto-TV apparatus to verify the man's identity. After his servant, dressed like a giant bellboy, opens three layers of doors, Ennyday hears the lawman's appeal. There's a man in Short Beach rolling in wealth despite lacking apparent means of support. Certainly something requires investigation there!

In Short Beach we are introduced to the mysterious leaping fish, which are inflatable floating devices for coastal frolicking. We are also introduced to the film's heroine, Inane the Fish Blower (Bessie Love). That's what they call the girl who inflates the inflatables with an air pump. The lurking Coke Ennyday discovers her in distress, having fallen off a pier into shallow water. Skipping into action with the celerity of a Keystone Kop, Coke flings himself off the pier and plants himself head-first in the mud. Inane has to rescue him from this predicament, but he'll return the favor later. The man Ennyday was assigned to trail, earlier shown literally rolling in money in his bed, is, in fact, a drug smuggler; he sends two Japanese minions out to sea with Leaping Fish, and they return with contraband. Poor Inane knows nothing about this, but is threatened just the same by the amorous attentions of Fishy Joe. Another member of the criminal ring is the Chinese launderer Sum Hop. For you youngsters, that was more drug humor. Despite his perpetual daze some instinct drives Coke Ennyday to discover a cache of opium, which he commences to eat like cake batter out of the bowl. In the double climax Coke must battle the yellow perils and their white master, while Inane must defend her virtue against Fishy Joe. She defends it with all the vim and violence you'd expect of Douglas Fairbanks himself, wiping the floor with Joe, while Ennyday, quivering as if he'd OD'd on Acme Earthquake Pills, uses his trusty hypodermics to inject his foes into various states of stupefaction. One virtually floats through the ceiling, while another throws himself out a window. Finally comes the showdown with the mastermind, which conveniently goes down in darkness, with Coke conveniently victorious when the lights go on again. Once more Coke Ennyday has conquered crime, and this time he gets the girl, too -- only that's not the end of the story. Before we really got started with the story we were shown a quick shot of Fairbanks out of makeup, laughing at something he'd just read. The film closes with the real Fairbanks trying to sell the very story we've just seen to the scenario department at the Triangle Studio. The department head tells him to stick to acting, and Fairbanks exits with a pout. He actually did a lot of his own writing under the Elton Thomas pseudonym, but here he gives one of the great good-sport performances ever in what some have seen as a send up of his own already-formed frantic screen persona. It's an all-out fearless physical performance that shows the young star unafraid to look like a complete idiot, flaunting the fakeness of Ennyday's moustache, rocking his ridiculous outfits, and pretty much pogo-ing through most of the story as if he, the actor, really were on something. He helps mightily to make The Mystery of the Leaping Fish one of the damnedest things you'll ever seen. And you can see it right here, as uploaded to YouTube by one Ivan Smirnov. Check it out, man...

THE FIGHTER (2010)

One of the most frequently repeated criticisms I've read of David O. Russell's latest film is that it ended too early. Reviewers familiar with "Irish" Micky Ward's career often opined that the film would have had a more fitting climax had it shown Ward's fights with Arturo Gatti, which are considered some of the best, from an action standpoint, of the last decade. Never mind that Ward lost two of three of those bouts; they're all presumed to be more dramatic or cinematic than the fight in which Ward actually won his championship and which closes The Fighter. These complaints missed the point. The complainers thought they were watching a boxing movie, or The Micky Ward Story, instead of the film Russell made, which is about something else.

The confusion may be understandable given that the film is named after Mark Wahlberg's character and that Wahlberg has top billing. But you may recall that Christian Bale won an Oscar for playing Ward's crackhead brother, and that Melissa Leo won an Oscar for playing their trashy, controlling, clannish mother, while Wahlberg went home empty-handed. That's because he walked into a kind of trap. Sometimes the lead actor or star is doomed to have his film stolen from him by a flamboyant supporting player. But The Fighter is a film designed to be stolen from its star by everyone else on screen. This isn't Wahlberg's fault, unless you blame him for taking the part in the first place. He actually gives a very creditable performance, but the story requires Micky Ward, the ostensible man of violence, to be the relatively calm, almost passive center of a maelstrom of dysfunction. Everyone in his orbit is some sort of white-trash gargoyle, including not just his mother and brother but all his shrieking skanky sisters and even his otherwise sympathetic girlfriend (Amy Adams was also nominated for an Oscar), who becomes as territorial and possessive toward Micky while protecting him from his kin as they've been protecting him from her. The irony of the piece is that Micky doesn't see why everyone should be fighting over him. Forced into an either-or choice late in the picture, he rejects it. The film's been setting us up to want him make a clean break from his dreadful family, but at the climax, which comes before the title fight, he insists that he can't walk away from either his family or his girlfriend or his new handlers -- he needs them all on his side to prevail. There's something almost wholesome about the film's endorsement of compromise, however anticlimactic it may seem in performance. And when you consider that that's Wahlberg's big moment rather than any fight he's in, you see why he's been eclipsed, however unfairly, by his supporting cast.

By comparison, Christian Bale dominates the film as if this were the Dicky Eklund comeback story that his character presumes that the HBO crew is shooting as they follow him into crack dens. Look at the poster above and tell me who the star is. If you told me that second-billed Bale actually had more screen time than top-billed Wahlberg, I'd believe it. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this, except that it doesn't make sense to nominate such a performance for Best Supporting Actor. Bale is clearly the co-star of the movie and the Academy should have treated him as such. As for Melissa Leo and the other performers, I'm not familiar enough with them to judge their skills as actors, but they were uniformly convincing in their trashy roles, while Russell planted them in an equally convincing milieu. Style takes second place to storytelling here, and that's appropriate for the subject matter.

Micky Ward presumably had his family issues straightened out by the time he fought Arturo Gatti, so from Russell's standpoint there wasn't really a story left to tell, however dramatic fight fans found those battles. But I can understand the reviewers somewhat. A few years ago, after watching Cinderella Man, I thought that Ron Howard should have ended it with Jim Braddock losing his title to Joe Louis, one hero yielding his place to a greater, but not without a valiant struggle. Given that Braddock did floor Louis during that fight, I felt that it had real dramatic potential. But Howard had told the story of overcoming adversity and despair that he wanted to tell, and I don't think his film is really worse for ending when it did. The same goes for The Fighter. Sometimes boxing films are about more than boxing, and then the last thing they need is more boxing.

...But for those who are curious, here's the sequel, Ward-Gatti I, as condensed and uploaded to YouTube by the folks at HBO.


April 28th: And here's another sequel: Alice Ward, the fighters' mother, passed away this week.

CISCO PIKE (1972)

"He's a prophet, he's a pusher..." These are the lines of a Kris Kristofferson song that Cybill Shepherd quotes to Robert de Niro, to Travis Bickle's indignant confusion ("I have never pushed!"), in Taxi Driver. Moviegoers first heard the actual song in Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike, which "introduced" Kristofferson in the title role (he had already performed in Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie)while giving top billing to then red hot but here relatively little-seen Gene Hackman. Kristofferson is credited with writing and performing four songs on the soundtrack. This one in particular raises questions. Was it composed by Kristofferson for the picture? If so, is it Kristofferson's commentary on the character he plays, or should we think of it as a song written by Cisco Pike? In that case, is it Pike's way of truth-telling on himself or is the song an ironically unselfconscious commentary intended for someone else? The song itself describes its subject as "a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction," so perhaps we should leave it at that.

Cisco Pike is a singer-songwriter and onetime band leader who had at least one hit song ("Breakdown") and a few successful concerts around 1966 before declining into petty drug dealership and jail time. Out of prison for now, but still in some legal jeopardy, he's determined to go straight and return to the music business, encouraged by his aspiring yogi girlfriend Sue (Karen Black). Since creative success wouldn't make much of a movie, Cisco finds himself bedeviled by a corrupt narc, Leo Holland (Hackman), who's nabbed 100 kilos of pot from a drug dealer and wants to make money from it. We'll learn that he's about to be dumped from the force due to a medical condition one year short of eligibility for a pension. The $10,000 he expects to make from the pot will be his nest egg, but Cisco will have to sell it for him, over a three-day weekend, or else Holland will make sure the musician ends up back in jail.

Good and bad influences: hippie Karen Black and cop Gene Hackman.

The plot is a scaffold for a series of episodes illustrating Cisco's descent back into the drug demimonde on the borderland of the music scene our hero hopes to re-enter. He visits recording studios and nightclubs and hooks up with old cronies and colleagues, but his main purpose is to move "keys," and he finds quite a few customers in his old milieu. Sometimes Holland screws up deals by lurking too close for buyers' comfort, and sometimes Cisco has to abort sales when he recognizes other narcs from details like polished shoes. He tries to give the dope back to Holland at one point, but the cop convinces him at gunpoint to resume his salesmanship. The weekend carries Cisco further away from Sue's presumably positive influence until he's cheating on her two women at a time. Worse, his old bandmate Jesse Dupre (Harry Dean "H.D." Stanton) turns up in a very needy state. He'd be happy to reform the band or score some major drugs. His main problem is that, while he feels the pressure to sell before Holland's deadline, he also finds his adventures too much fun for his own good, for a while.

Norton's episodic script has a cumulative atmospheric effect, immersing you in the hazy border zone between the world Cisco wants to reclaim and the one to which he must return. Their close proximity, the effective borderlessness of the scene, is part of his problem. How he responds to the challenge brings us back to the question of the correspondence between Cisco Pike and Kris Kristofferson. The real man was not the first choice for the role, from what I've read, but his presence and his song contributions tempt us to ask how good a musician Cisco Pike is supposed to be. If a different actor played the role, we could more easily assume that Pike's talent is actually pretty limited and that his early success may have been all he could have expected. Either way, of course, Cisco Pike is a tragedy of thwarted potential, but if Pike is supposed to have written the Kristofferson songs, and is stuck where he is, then it's arguably a tragedy of a different order. As an actor, Kristofferson further obscures matters. I've never really cared for him but others clearly respond to his perceived authenticity or his gravelly-voiced masculinity. He was obviously a talented songwriter, but could he play one on film? What would one look and sound like, anyway? Obviously there's no set type, but Kristofferson playing Pike still leaves me wondering whether the actor was effectively portraying a relatively untalented artist or ineffectively portraying a superior talent.

Familiar '70s faces: Harry Dean Stanton and Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas

The Kristofferson enigma doesn't necessarily determine whether Cisco Pike is good or not. As a Seventies buff, I was impressed by the locations and the ambiance, and the lead is supported by a strong cast of period stalwarts and iconic performers. Hackman doesn't really earn his top billing despite striving to make his character eccentric; nevertheless this is from a period when his presence is always welcome. Overall, I think any Seventies enthusiast will find items of interest in this folk-rock noir. If you think that decade was a golden age of American cinema, it can't hurt to give this representative film a try.

Fans of Seventies violence won't be disappointed either; Cisco Pike climaxes with a gunfight between a man (center) and a helicopter.

With no trailer available, here's Kristofferson's original performance of "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" from his 1971 album The Silver Tongued Devil and I, as uploaded to YouTube by woudshoorn.

INFERNAL STREET (1973): How do you Just Say No in Chinese?

Ti Hong is an aspiring doctor who works in Dr. Chu's "surgery," as the English dubbing of Shen Jiang's film calls his clinic. Our hero's mind seems more set on kung fu, as we might hope, this being a kung fu film, though his main motivation seems to be the opportunity to practice with Chu's attractive daughter. We find them desecrating a graveyard with punches and kicks as the story begins. Dr. Chu's staff has been treating a growing number of opium and morphine addicts recently. As one doctor notes, "It just started in the last six months since the Japanese opened that club." Coincidence? Who are we kidding? This is a Chinese kung fu movie; all calamities are obviously the Japs' fault. Sure enough, at that club we find the Japs plotting their next marketing strategy. "I think we ought to import less opium, get more morphine," one suggests to their boss, the Chairman -- a well-dressed man whose face we don't see, who communicates with his minions mostly with growls and grunts.

Business is good, but could be better if only Dr. Chu, who is waging an anti-drug campaign, could be discredited. The Chairman and his Chinese collaborators come up with a brilliant stratagem to do just that. They send one of their men to the surgery for emergency treatment.

Doctor: You a drug addict?
Minion: What's the matter? Mean you can't tell?
[Doctor takes Minion's pulse]
M: What's wrong?
D: Nothing!
M: Nothing? What do you mean? I'm an opium smoker. I've been smoking opium for the past fifteen years!
D: You don't look like an addict.
M: Well, I'm sorry about that, too! What am I supposed to look like? What sort of surgery is this? Oh, come on! Prescribe something for me! Something to make me feel better!
D: Yeah, yeah. We'll do that, yeah. Hey Lu, the usual dose.

After detecting nothing wrong with the man, the doctor gives him "the usual dose" of something on the man's word that, despite all the evidence one's pulse can provide, he's a desperate drug addict. He sure does act like one afterward, raving in ersatz agony and telling anyone who happens to walk in that "I've gone mad!"

The doctors don't believe it, but the minion's pals defend his honor and the integrity of his illness, accusing Dr. Chu, who had nothing to do with the transaction, of malpractice. After some pushing and shoving, followed by some punching and kicking from Ti Hong, Chu agrees to pay the gangsters some hush money. But Ti Hong isn't having it. He invades the Jap-operated gambling den and wins the money back with extreme prejudice. That makes him a target for the Chairman's goon squad, but Ti Hong welcomes the attention. Confronted in the countryside by superior numbers, he asks a Hitler-moustached minion, "Are you a Chinese or a Japanese?" Why does he ask? "The Chinese, there's always hope for them. I'll treat them lightly. But the Japs, those pigs shouldn't live." This is actually just bluster. The victorious Ti Hong spares the Japanese, contenting himself with cutting their ears off.

We could have warned these Japanese gangsters that Hitler style was useless against Chinese boxing, but since it would have fallen on deaf ears anyway the consequences of their folly are no great loss.

Dr. Chu has a conflicted view of kung fu. He feels that his daughter and Ti Hong are wasting their time, but he once ran his own kung fu school. Back then he was just as opposed to drugs, but certain Japanese gangsters questioned his views about the deleterious effects of opium. They challenged him to a fight against a champion of theirs who not only sold but used the stuff. The only unusual effect of his addiction was to give him something like iron fingers and the power to embed them in wooden surfaces. He used this talent to tear Chu's shirt and bruise his back. This defeat compelled Chu to give up martial arts (and anti-drug campaigning, for a time), steering him toward his medical career. We've given you the key puzzle pieces now. There's a master criminal whose face we don't see, and the hero's master was humiliated by someone we do see in a flashback. Can you guess the Chairman's identity?...

Meanwhile, the Chairman's strategy shifts from discrediting Chu to discrediting Ti Hong. The bad guys approach this challenge with the same brilliance they showed earlier. They send the wife of a comedy-relief morphine addict into dangerous proximity to our hero so she can cry rape at an inconvenient moment. The addict denounces him and the wife insists that she couldn't resist him because he's so strong. Enraged, Ti Hong shoves her to the sidewalk, stunning her. The bad guys slip her a serious mickey and declare her dead. This gets Ti Hong carted off to prison, where he can still beat most of the guards and their Japanese pals with both hand shackled above his head. But it's convenient for him to be there once the bad guys arrest Chu and his daughter, bringing everyone together for the big reveal of the Chairman's identity and the big showdown between him and Ti Hong.

I can't fairly judge the quality of star Yiu Tien Lung's fight choreography because Mill Creek Entertainment's copy of Infernal Street is a clearly-cropped fullscreen version. The fighting is passable and our hero brawls with expressive enthusiasm, but the story (at least in English) is childishly ludicrous. The writer wants to drive home the anti-drug message, most forcibly in Ti Hong's flashback to his father's death from addiction, and his mother's immediate suicide, presumably from smashing the back of her head against a wall. But the dialogue (again, at least the dubbing) undermines any seriousness of purpose, as when an addict is asked why he doesn't kick the habit and answers, "Come on, I couldn't do it and it doesn't cost that much!" in a Jerry Lewis-like voice.

The toll of drugs: Above, Ti Hong's mom is collateral damage. Below, "Would you like some morphine?" "WOULD I?!?"

It renders the drama ridiculous but definitely enhances the film's entertainment value for certain audiences. I'm sure the typical anti-Jap material has the same effect, giving some viewers a certain thrill of transgression at seeing such naked hatred expressed by one people for another. Here it's done in such a bloody slapstick manner that it really is kind of funny, whether it was meant that way or not, and I suppose the Chinese in the Seventies still had fresh enough memories of Japanese atrocities to explain their attitude. In the form in which we have the film I can safely recommend it only to bad movie buffs who'd find the idea of a Chinese Reefer Madness with kung fu and xenophobia thrown in potentially appealing.

Flashlegsrare has uploaded a video trailer (widescreen and subtitled) for Infernal Street to YouTube.