By Hank Reineke
Historians of Hollywood’s Golden Age will surely remember
the name of Louella Parsons. Using the long
reach of the Hearst Newspaper Corporation as her platform, Parsons was crowned
the “Queen of Hollywood.†She was one of the earliest and foremost conveyors of
tinsel-town gossip. A radio personality
as well as a syndicated columnist, Parsons’ star would only dim when a rival, the
notorious Hedda Hopper, arrived in town circa 1938.
Regardless of the competition, Parsons would soldier on
and enjoy a long career. In her column
of October 28, 1958 (“Shocker Dueâ€), the magpie broke the news that Steve Broidy,
the president of Allied Artists, Inc. had “turned over†the studio’s newest
project “Confessions of an Opium Eater
to Producer-Director William Castle.†The forty-four year-old Castle, only then in the earliest stages of
elevating promotional ballyhoo to an
art form, had already been in the movie business for a decade and a half. Though
no one would confuse Castle as an auteur,
the producer-director-writer could reliably churn out marketable low-budget westerns,
adventure films and thrillers for such studios as Columbia, Monogram, and
Allied Artists.
In 1958, Castle would direct the moody and atmospheric
horror-mystery Macabre for Allied. Then, in September of that same year, the
filmmaker was busy wrapping up principal shooting on yet another low-budget
horror The House on Haunted Hill. Though The
House on Haunted Hill (with star Vincent Price) would not see release until
February 1959, studio bookkeepers immediately recognized the film’s box-office
potency. Allied moved quickly to sign
the work-for-hire Price to appear in what would turn out to be a more dissolute,
under-performing quickie titled The Bat
(1959).
Parsons reportage was too early out of the gate. For starters, she was misinformed regarding William
Castle’s involvement in Confessions of an
Opium Eater. Not only had she reported
that the acknowledged “Poor Man’s Hitchcock†was to leave for Tokyo, Japan in
January 1959 for location scouting, Parsons also leaked several other bits of
erroneous information: that Japanese Miiko Taka (“Marlon Brando’s screen-love
in Sayonarraâ€) had signed on as lead
actress, that the film would be shot in color, and that the resulting
production would be one of the studio’s “high budget pictures for the year.†None of this, of course, would turn out to be
true. Following the success of House on Haunted Hill, both Castle and Price
were able to strike a better deal with Columbia. It was through that studio that the (mostly
monochrome) low-budget horror-flick The
Tingler would be released in late 1959.
It’s difficult to determine exactly why Allied would
choose to press on in their desire to bring Thomas De Quincey’s slim book Confessions of an English Opium Eater to
the big-screen. The fact that it was a
public domain work and therefore free to pillage as source material cannot be
discounted. Truth be told, it’s neither
a particularly engaging story nor a tale worthy of being committed to celluloid.
Originally published in 1821 as a
serial in London magazine, the tale recounts
- in a rather straightforward if vividly described manner - the author’s
addiction to opiates. As a harrowing
medical and psychological treatise, De Quincey’s work was invaluable but, not too
surprisingly, almost nothing other than the slightly amended and grim
exploitative title would be utilized in this subsequent 1962 screen version.
Though the studio was able to entice Vincent Price – if
only briefly - back into the fold, Confessions
of an Opium Eater was the last of four films the actor would appear in for Allied. (His penultimate film for the company was a walk-on
role in the prison drama Convicts 4). Though usually cast in elegant and villainous
roles, Price is – at long last - a hero in this one, though he’s positively
raffish as first person narrator De Quincey. This is odd as the actual Thomas De Quincey was born into a British
mercantile family of means and prestige. Though a wild youth, he attended college, maintained
friendships with such colleagues as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and reportedly never
left the British Isles in the course of his lifetime. In the film however, this educated man of
letters is more provocatively cast as a tough gun-runner who developed a taste
for opium while working the tough streets of China’s mainland. Upon his 1902 return from the exotic east to
the gritty brick and clapboard streets of San Francisco’s rough and tumble Chinatown,
Price’s De Quincey’s conscience is stirred by the sad plight of the sorrowful
women we’re introduced to near the film’s beginning. The women have been kidnapped from their
families or torn from English-speaking Christian missions back home. Upon their arrival in the city by the Bay, they’re
abused, starved, and manhandled by ruthless Tongs who plan to barter their
charms in exchange for opium.
This is the sort of derring-do adventure-thriller programmer
that Monogram Pictures (the forebear of Allied) had churned out plentifully during
the 1940s. Nearly all of the creaky trademark
Monogram tropes are put into play: inscrutable
Asian villainy, exotic, smoky rooms containing secret passageways, routes to
underground labyrinths, trapdoors, drugs, crime, and bamboo-caged damsels-in-distress. The problem is this film was released in 1962
and such caricatures were from a time out of mind and would soon bring swift
condemnation. Price’s
biographer-daughter notes that Confessions
was “caught in unwelcome controversy when the Los Angeles Committee against
Defamation of the Chinese protested its release.â€
Robert Hill’s purple prose fortune cookie of a screenplay
is possibly the weakest link in a production of already tenuous value. Though the black and white film runs only eighty-five
minutes, it seems much longer. A lengthy
opium-induced hallucination scene goes on too long and is ridiculously unconvincing. Near the film’s climax, there’s a trio of writhing
slave-trade dance numbers featuring a bevy of reluctant female conscripts. These auction-block “interpretative dances†are
merely a preamble to the round of bidding before an audience of salacious Tong
members. These dances were so painful to
sit through that I nearly found myself tempted to partake in a mind-numbing taste
of the special stash myself.
To the film’s credit, the producer was not afraid to cast
an almost-exclusive Asian cast to essay the roles of Asians, no matter how thin
or racially-insensitively drawn these characters were. There’s no casting of such British colonials
as Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, or Swede Warner Oland, to play ethnic Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan type roles. It’s interesting to note that Confessions
was released the same year as Eon Productions’ Dr. No: in the first James Bond film it’s a Canadian, Joseph
Wiseman, who would assume the role as the titular, sinister and half-Asian
super-villain. So such casting was par
for the course. The problem is that Confessions is no Dr. No. Even for us diehard Vincent
Price fans, this film is little more than a curiosity.
Producer-Director Albert Zugsmith’s Confessions of an Opium Eater is made available as a Warner Archive
DVD-R release. The film is presented in its
original back and white and in a Widescreen 1.66.1 transfer. A true bare bones release, the set features
only the movie itself without even the nominal addition of a chapter selection menu
or theatrical trailer. Though the most
indefatigable of Vincent Price fans (of which I’m one) will likely choose to
add this film to their home library, more casual fans – if interested at all - are
best advised to stream the movie as a one-off.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM THE CINEMA RETRO MOVIE STORE