What an amazing piece of history! Most people don't know that, yes, cocaine was in extremely wide recreational use in the years between 1900-1925. In fact it was something of an epidemic in the latter years of that period. The facts that hospitals were swamped with cocaine addicts and that as much as a 1/5 of some city populations were registered as addicted are lost to common historical knowledge.
However this film, made by Tod Browning (the infamous creator of "Freaks"), has absolutely nothing negative to say about cocaine: Cocaine is funny, cocaine is fun, and cocaine lets you do superhuman things.
Fairbanks, who was a coke addict in real life, stars in this film. It's funny simply for the fact that it's an unapologetic pro-drug comedy, though if you don't find that kind of thing funny, you won't find this movie interesting at all. In fact it seems like the movie was made on drugs, the titles go by so quickly that you'd have to be a member of Mensa just to read them without pausing. The plot is nonexistent, it's just a series of cheap drug gags, in the vein of Cheech & Chong had they lived in 1915.
However this film, made by Tod Browning (the infamous creator of "Freaks"), has absolutely nothing negative to say about cocaine: Cocaine is funny, cocaine is fun, and cocaine lets you do superhuman things.
Fairbanks, who was a coke addict in real life, stars in this film. It's funny simply for the fact that it's an unapologetic pro-drug comedy, though if you don't find that kind of thing funny, you won't find this movie interesting at all. In fact it seems like the movie was made on drugs, the titles go by so quickly that you'd have to be a member of Mensa just to read them without pausing. The plot is nonexistent, it's just a series of cheap drug gags, in the vein of Cheech & Chong had they lived in 1915.