“I just arrived with the ship. I’ll be there right away. – Augustin” Such is the text of a telegram message (in German) shown at the beginning of this split-reel comedy, received by the Cineteca del Friuli in the 1990s from the Bundesarchiv in Germany. Augustin, a tall, heavily built explorer, meets his friends in front of a villa. He has evidently visited far away countries in the East, as shown by the silk cloak and scimitars he proudly extracts from a trunk as gifts, to the joy of the family (a stately bespectacled lady is disappointed and upset when she receives a monkey as a present).
The luggage also includes a kit for opium smoking, complete with a generous supply of the exotic drug, and Bigorno can’t resist the temptation of trying it as soon as he finds himself alone in the living room. A few puffs are enough to give him hallucinations: first, all the furniture is frantically twirling around him; the room then becomes a harem, with Bigorno’s wife and mother-in-law turned into dancing odalisques. In the course of his nightmare he has smashed the room to smithereens, prompting the intervention of the angry matron, who kicks the explorer out of the household. After a swift recovery from his misadventure, the victim of his own curiosity swears never to touch the opium pipe ever again.
The reel comes to its end with the logo of the Italian company Itala Film – which is probably why the print was mistakenly catalogued by the Bundesarchiv as a Cretinetti (André Deed) short – but the splice on the nitrate positive appears to have been hastily made, thus suggesting it was added at some point in a projection room, maybe as film leader. The film was identified by two staff members of the Cineteca del Friuli, Giuliana Puppin and Simone Londero, from the opening sequence set in Port Lympia, Nice. – Paolo Cherchi Usai