Bigorno fume l'opium (1914) User Reviews

What a Dope!

[boblipton · 5/10 · 24 October 2010]

Bigorno is by the seashore with his wife and mother in law when a friend returns from a trip to the Orient with gifts -- including a hookah and supply of Opium, which Bigorno tries, with disastrous results to the furniture.

This is the first of the Bigorno series I have encountered. It is well directed by Romeo Bosetti, better remembered for directing the Patouillard series of breakneck slapstick. However, this attempt to meld pure destructive slapstick with a more human, Max Linder style character does not really work. Perhaps the failure lies in not having seen others in the series and so not having a chance to develop a familiarity with the character. Perhaps one reel is not enough to permit more than some scene-setting (which takes up more than half the film) and one gag.

Or, more likely, this one is not really very good and with Max Linder as competition, as well as Keystone imports from the US, the days for this style of screen comedy were numbered.

Opium Dreams Go Up in Smoke

[Cineanalyst · 4 October 2021]

The third short film from the archives of La Cineteca el Friuli in the Pordenone Silent Film Festival lineup today, "Bigorno Smokes Opium" is a wackadoodle of a comedic sketch. As oft the case with these things, its seemingly anti-drug message is undermined by all the interesting stuff in the movie arising from someone consuming drugs. It's also mired in Orientalism--never mind the European colonialists were the ones pushing the dope, and, again, the exoticism, along with the drugs, is what makes the film fun. Otherwise, it's just a dull sketch about some guy returning to France from his travels abroad and not about dreams induced by opium smoking that leads its user to wildly break everything in a room.

Reportedly, Bigorno was part of a series of comedies, but by itself, it's one of surprisingly quite a few silent films to depict drug use in weird ways. Kino released a home video a while back entitled "The Devil's Needle & Other Tales of Vice and Redemption" with such films. Charlie Chaplin got a shot of energy sitting on a needle in "Easy Street" (1917). The earliest adaptation of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" that I've seen, from 1915, rewrites the doomed protagonist as a cocaine fiend. Even tobacco led to "Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy" (1909). My favorite, though, remains the Douglas Fairbanks parody of a hophead Sherlock Holmes, "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916).