Our fevered delirium of a tale begins along the foggy Pacific coast somewhere near San Francisco, circa 1902, where just offshore, the crew of a Chinese junk hastily works to offload their latest shipment via a large cargo net. But the reluctant cargo in question is strictly human: oriental women, kidnapped and brought to America to be sold, at auction, for opium.
Rendezvousing with another, smaller boat, these human traffickers then brutally dump those women over the side, onto the other ship's deck, without much thought for their fragile “merchandise.” Seems they weren't as sneaky as they thought as a coast guard frigate is rapidly closing in. And after a brief exchange of fire, the junk takes a direct hit and explodes. No apparent survivors.
Meanwhile, on the other, undetected vessel, the shanghaied prisoners are hastily chained together and rowed ashore. But once they reach the beach, these slavers are then bushwhacked by another group of armed men. Now, while the captives try to escape during the confusion and bloodshed, at this point, we’re not really sure if this is a rescue or just an attempt to hijack the merchandise. Either way, one of the girls, whom we’ll come to know as Lotus (Kim), almost escapes by hiding in the surrounding dunes. But she’s soon spotted and chased down by one of the bad guys, who is in turn intercepted by the apparent leader of that second faction.
Thus, Lotus continues to flee away from the beach as those two fight, with the slaver eventually winning out. But as he turns his lecherous attention back on the girl, in the first of many bizarre left turns, Lotus is suddenly saved by the timely intervention of a white stallion, who rears up and angrily knocks the evildoer off a cliff! (Which concludes in a rather spectacular dummy death plunge.) Okay, so, I think, maybe, the color of the wild horse was to show this second group were actually the good guys as the slavers are routed and this does, indeed, prove to be a rescue. But then the original buyers finally show up for the expected delivery and gun down the victors. Thus, most of the girls are recaptured but at least Lotus is safe -- for now, he typed ominously...
Our scene then shifts to San Francisco, Chinatown, where the local constabulary are hurriedly cordoning off that section of the city and won't allow anyone to enter. And we soon find out why, through a plot-specific newsie, who reveals a Tong War is about to erupt between those who run the human auctions and those who oppose them.
Enter Gilbert De Quincey (Price), mercenary for hire, dope-addict, and amateur philosopher. Ignoring the barricades, De Quincey dodges a dive-bombing seagull, which then falls dead at his feet, as he cautiously enters this no man’s land, making his way along the deserted, wind-swept streets until he reaches his destination: an antique shop owned by his contact, Chin Foon (Ahn). Here, De Quincey reveals his tattoo of the Moon Serpent to gain entrance, signifying that he and Chin Foon are both loyal to Ling Tang, who rules Chinatown with the money and opium he rakes in by holding those unwilling bridal auctions.
A mysterious recluse, no one knows for sure how old Ling Tang really is. In fact, no one has actually seen the man for over a decade. Meaning we have ourselves a secretive ancient warlord, who runs a hidden base of operations somewhere beneath the streets of Chinatown, opium wars, fighting tongs, missing women, and now an Anglo adventurer who’s about to get mired into something that’s way, way, way over his head. And is all of this brewing trouble in little China starting to sound kinda familiar to everyone else..?
When the creative tandem of Jack Pollexfen and Aubrey Wisberg's sci-fi film, The Man from Planet X (1951), managed a modest profit, they immediately wanted to strike again while the box-office fires were still hot. And to help launch their next feature, the post-apocalyptic Captive Women (1952), they brought in a third party to help finance it; a fella by the name of Albert Zugsmith.
Now, as a filmmaking entrepreneur, Zugsmith was kind of a gold-plated enigma, wrapped-up in a soiled toilet paper conundrum. Born in 1910, after college, with a law degree tucked in his back pocket, Zugsmith went to work for a newspaper. Starting out as a cub reporter, the man quickly moved his way up through the ranks and by 1935 started his own paper, The Daily World, in his native Atlantic City, where he served as managing editor and publisher. And by 1939, Zugsmith started brokering sales for media properties -- newspapers, radio networks, and, eventually, television stations, making millions off of those commissions.
Thus, as his fortune grew on that front, Zugsmith was also still practicing law. And in 1947, he was famously approached by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to represent them in a landmark creative rights lawsuit against National Periodical Publications (DC Comics) over profits generated by their creations, Superman and Superboy. Here, Zugsmith would win a split decision in the year-long trial, losing out on The Man of Steel claim due to some fine print in a work for hire contract, but proved the publisher had no legal claim on Superboy. Despite this setback, Siegel and Shuster would continue their fight for creator’s rights and would eventually settle the matter out of court in 1975.
Thus and lo, by the time the 1950s rolled around, Zugsmith had two things on his mind: one, that ton of money currently burning a hole in his pocket; and two, always a film buff, a burning desire to get into the motion picture business. And after Pollexfen and Wisberg gave him an in with Captive Women -- the three would form American Pictures Corporation together, Zugsmith went solo on his next feature; a paranoid Cold War hysteria piece for Columbia called Invasion U.S.A. (1952) -- and in hindsight, his version of America being overrun by Communist paratroopers was pretty-damned hysterical.
Then, after a few more genre pictures for APC -- Sword of Venus (1953), Port Sinister (1953), Zugsmith was lured over to Universal International, where he set his sights a little higher with Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and a couple of really solid noir pieces -- The Tattered Dress (1957) and Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957). But at the same time, Zugsmith was also backing Jack Arnold's sci-fi classic, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and The Girl in the Kremlin (1957), where Zsa Zsa Gabor was mankind's last hope against Uncle Joe Stalin's new reign of terror (-- by apparently shaving every woman bald for … reasons).
Also around this time, Zugsmith was dabbling with a few ideas of his own. And while filming the western Man in the Shadow (1957), the producer gave one of his stars -- and favorite drinking buddy, Orson Welles, a script for an unrealized project of his called Badge of Evil, which eventually morphed into Touch of Evil (1958), which turned out to be one of the last American films Welles would direct, as no other studio would touch him.
Suddenly a hot commodity, MGM soon came calling with a six-picture deal, resulting in a string of drug-addled juvenile delinquent pictures, including the seminal High School Confidential (1958), Girls Town (1959) and The Beat Generation (1959), for which lawyer Zugsmith managed to secure the copyright on the term “Beat Generation'' before Jack Kerouac and John Holmes knew what hit them. All three films also featured Zugsmith's new favorite starlet, Mamie Van Doren, and the producer wasn’t done with her yet.
See, as was his schizophrenic nature, the producer followed these exploitation pieces up with a couple of hormone-fueled goofball comedies -- College Confidential (1960), where Steve Allen subs in for Dr. Alfred Kinsey to unlock the not-so-secret sex-life of college coeds, and the completely hair-brained Sex-Kittens Go to College (1960), where Van Doren plays a Two-Gun-Toting-Tassel-Twirler from Tallahassee, who’s trying to escape her past as a stripper by becoming a college professor who likes to discharge firearms in public as not to draw attention to herself. There's also a refrigerator-box robot and a monkey banging on a typewriter (-- I'm gonna assume he's working on the script); and then Uncle Fester showed up; and John Carradine dances the Charleston; and I think I just saw Vampira; and oddly enough, Conway Twitty was there, too, summing it all up in song.
Anyhoo, wanting to push things even further, Zugsmith's next sex-farce, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960), which he co-directed with star Mickey Rooney, was condemned by The Catholic League of Decency. And after that kiss of death, the major studios stopped calling. This was too bad, as the movie’s pretty harmless -- even for the time of its release. And if it had to be condemned, at least denounce it for being too silly -- not for being blasphemous. I mean, I ask you, How blasphemous could it really be to have Martin Milner and Van Doren running around in a plastic version of the Garden of Eden in their birthday suits while Rooney's devil tempts them with an intoxicating apple, amIright? And then came Dondi (1961), based on a popular syndicated cartoon strip, which proved to be both a critical and box office disaster -- and its reputation as one of the worst films ever made was well earned indeed.
Zugsmith was fairly washed-up after that back to back, two-punch fiasco, but he still had one more feature left in him for Allied Artists before he went full-bore into the burgeoning Nudie-Cutie and sexploitation scene with things like The Incredible Sex Revolution (1966), Psychedelic Sexualis (1966), and Two Roses and a Golden Rod (1969). And luckily for us, this last hurrah was Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) -- released on TV as Souls for Sale; a bizarre, almost avant-garde exploitation piece that Zugsmith had firing on all cylinders from the get-go, which just gets weirder and weirder the deeper our protagonist gets into the underbelly of Chinatown.
Hired by Ruby Lo (Ho), Ling Tang’s second in command, De Quincey was brought in as some hired muscle to help quash the rebellious factions and recover one of those girls lost at the beach -- the prized girl in question being Lotus. Now, De Quincey finds Ruby Lo at the funeral of George Wah (Loo). Turns out Wah was a crusading newspaper editor who constantly spoke out against these illegal auctions; and he apparently did more than just write about them, too, as we recognize his memorial photo and realize it was Wah who got killed at the beach while trying to save Lotus.
Curious as to why she's attending the funeral of her enemy, Ruby Lo explains with an old Chinese proverb; and it almost makes sense in a “keep your enemies close but your friends closer” frame, but with the way she keeps evading De Quincey's questions about Wah, you also sense there was something more intimate between those two that, well, wanted to make love and not war. Too late now, and still waiting for a straight answer, just as our bickering duo set foot outside the funeral home, the Dragon Flag is dropped -- the signal that the Tong War is now on like Donkey Kong; and as all hell breaks loose around them, Ruby Lo ducks into a passage and then slams the metal door shut behind her, leaving De Quincey to fend for himself.
Dodging the violence as best he can, our boy makes his way to the Chinatown Gazette where George Wah worked. Inside, De Quincey finds a secret room where Wah's people have hidden Lotus. Suddenly, a sizable chunk of Ling Tang's tong breaks in and finds them. Unexpectedly, considering who hired him, De Quincey grabs the girl and they escape to the sewers via another secret passageway. (And which side was he on again?) But those foot soldiers soon catch up and they snatch the girl back, while De Quincey is clobbered over the head.
Left for dead, our protagonist eventually wakes up, suspended in the air, hanging from a hook snagged by his coat collar. Not appreciating being treated like a side of beef, De Quincey is soon joined by Chin Foon and a mysterious masked man, who accuse him of treachery. Technically, Foon has little room to talk on that subject, as he reveals his allegiance to George Wah. Seems Foon also knew that Wah had hired an old gun-running friend of his to help break-up Ling Tang's stranglehold on Chinatown -- a friend who looks and acts just like our boy. Here, when De Quincey admits to playing both sides to double his money, Chin Foon and his silent partner vanish in a puff of smoke.
After managing to free himself, De Quincey soon discovers he's somewhere in the rat’s nest of catacombs beneath Chinatown. And a strange place it is, too, as the man explores further and stumbles upon a chamber of suspended bamboo cages filled with three half-starved women. As to why? Well, it seems that if a husband grows tired of his wife and doesn’t want her ghost haunting him forever, in lieu of killing her, all he has to do is lock them in one of these cages, let them starve to death, and then his conscience is clear thanks to this morbid technicality. One of the three was already dead, but De Quincey frees Lo Tsen (Kido) and Baby Doll (Moray), a dwarf who tires of her husbands quickly, after they agree to show him where the auctions take place.
Led to a warehouse, as the girls distract the guards, De Quincey finds Lotus inside, suspended in another cage. But the Mongol guards return and chase him off before he can free her. Finding refuge in a bathroom -- that's not just any bathroom, where, as the toilet triggers a secret panel that leads straight into an opium den, De Quincey buys himself a pipe, lights up, and then drifts off to la-la land.
We’re then treated to an extended montage of twisted imagery meant to represent the power and influence of the poppy -- represented by a bunch of stock monster footage from almost all of American International Picture's back catalogue. (No. Honest! I saw the Voodoo Woman, the Viking Women's Sea Serpent, a Saucer Man's hand, Bert I. Gordon's Giant Spider, the Screaming Skull and a whole lot more.) And then the film starts to get really weird (-- as if it wasn't weird enough already?!), when De Quincey suddenly wakes up and finds himself surrounded by Ling Tang's men.
Still under the influence of the opium, a bizarre, and eerily silent slow-motion chase scene ensues as he tries to get away. Now, I'm gonna get more into this sequence later in the wrap-up, but for now: let's just say De Quincey doesn’t make it, is once more subdued, and awakens in the presence of Ruby Lo, who reveals that she, too, has been playing both sides. Apparently, while she was embezzling money and munitions from Ling Tang, she was also having a torrid love affair with George Wah. As she’s monologuing, De Quincey almost escapes her clutches but, as usual, only winds up knocked unconscious again.
This time he wakes up in one of those suspended cages with Baby Doll; both under the guard of some giggling idiot and his royally pissed off cat, who reveals the prisoner's gloomy fate by sliding a panel open, revealing a tank of water, where a drowned woman silently floats, a massive stone tied around her neck. (I had assumed this was Lo Tsen -- until she shows up later during the climax.) Laughing boy then torments them further by opening another peek-hole, revealing the latest bridal auction is about to take place just on the other side of the wall.
Then, as the festivities begin, we get to watch a bunch of old men hoot and ogle over a cache of nubile young women, who they force to dance before they'll open the bidding. This provocative display also provides enough of a distraction for De Quincey, who manages to kill the guard, allowing him and Baby Doll to escape. Once free, they immediately head for Ruby Lo’s secret stash -- along with her stolen loot, her vault is full of fireworks, munitions, gunpowder, and, for some reason, a trussed up Lo Tsen. After freeing the girl, De Quincey breaks open one of those kegs and begins to spread the black powder all over the rest of the explosives.
Meanwhile, back at the auction, one of the old coots gets a little too curious about the latest lot, tugs on her hair, and discovers the girl is bald. This triggers a massive snit amongst the buyers over the merchandise being damaged and they all demand to see Ling Tang -- for only his personal assurance will prove this auction was on the level. And so, for the first time in ten years, Ling Tang finally makes a public appearance. With his elderly features hidden behind a mask, he calms everyone down and introduces Lotus -- the prized lot of the auction. This quiets the crowd, the bidding starts, and the old badger who doesn’t like bald women had the highest bid until it's discovered the packaged opium he planned to use as payment was phony.
With that, the old man removes his disguise, revealing he was really George Wah -- back from the dead! At almost the exact same moment, De Quincey blows the explosives in the vault. Turns out he and Wah had the whole thing planned out this way from the beginning (... riiiiiight). And as Ling Tang’s compound goes up in smoke, Wah, Lotus, De Quincey, Lo Tsen and Baby Doll regroup and escape to the war-torn streets. Too exposed and soon surrounded, with their only chance to get away safely being through the sewers, our band scurries down the nearest manhole but, alas, Lo Tsen and Baby Doll are killed bringing up the rear.
Once in the sewer proper, Ling Tang himself confronts them. Now, the sharp eye will notice that Ling Tang is sporting a rather nice pair of pumps as he and De Quincey tangle, allowing Wah and Lotus to escape. As their struggle intensifies, De Quincey knocks the mask off, revealing that Ling Tang was really Ruby Lo this whole time! Seems the old guy actually died ten years ago and she just assumed his role.
After that revelation, they both fall into the drainage water and are swept away by the current, locked in each other’s embrace. And as they tumble off toward the unknown, De Quincey ponders whether his current predicament was fate, destiny, or just another drug-induced dream.
You know, by the end credits of Confessions of an Opium Eater, you, as a viewer, might just be confessing to having hit the pipe yourself a few times. It’s that weird. And wonderful. Wonderfully weird. And this contact high can honestly be traced all the way back to the film’s source material.
Based loosely on Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical book of the same name, this tale first saw print in serialized form in London Magazine, running from September through October, 1821. And though it was originally published “anonymously” in the periodical, when it was released in book format as Confession of an Opium Eater in 1822 De Quincey finally put his name on it. A laudanum (opium) addict himself, De Quincey broke his story down into two parts: The Pleasures of Opium, dealing with the factors that led to his addiction and the welcome escape the drug provided, while the second, The Pains of Opium, dealt with the price to be paid for the same narcotic addiction -- insomnia, nightmares, frightening visions, and physical deterioration.
“The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected,” said De Quincey about his time under the influence. “Buildings, landscapes, were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.”
And while the book was popular and made De Quincey both rich and famous, his vivid prose was criticized from the very beginning by his detractors for glamorizing the use of opium. Somewhat ironically, his seminal work was also considered a clinical document on the drug. Or as Judson Lyon put it in his biography of De Quincey, “Since there was little systematic study of narcotics until long after his death, De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status and actually dominated the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations."
Now, as a wise-cracking robot once noted on Mystery Science Theater 3000, in reference to Village of the Giants (1965) allegedly mutating out of the H.G. Wells’ novel, Food of the Gods, Zugsmith’s Confessions of an Opium Eater was based on De Quincey’s book in that “they were both written in English.” Scripted by Zugsmith regular Robert Hill -- Female on the Beach (1955), Raw Edge (1956), the film dropped the source author's first-hand account of a narcotic addiction and traded it in for some straight-out pulp adventure instead with a heaping dose of the “Yellow Peril” on top, as Hill apparently broke into a fortune cookie factory and then scotch-taped all those little pieces of paper together for the majority of his dialogue.
Marketed as a horror movie by Allied Artists, Confessions of an Opium Eater was, indeed, more of an action-adventure yarn straight out of the old Republic serials, while maintaining the tenuous of threads to the source material by making Gilbert De Quincey the great, great grandson of the author. Now, with that Yellow Peril taint, I fully realize this film promotes some pretty rotten stereotypes; but if you can manage to keep all of that in historical context the only real problem I had with the film was that ending. It seemed a bit contrived with the double-revelation and was kinda disappointing after such a great build up, where being forced to really pay attention as to who was double-crossing who goes all for naught.
Zugsmith would serve as both producer and director on the film, and he kept the action moving well enough. And to help keep him on course, his crew was littered with many other notable genre veterans. Behind the camera, Joseph Biroc -- The Killer that Stalked New York (1950), 13 Ghosts (1960), made everything stark, dark or murky, making it hard to keep your bearings; couple that with Eugene Lourie’s -- The Colossus of New York (1957), The Giant Behemoth (1959), cheap but effective art direction on all those secret passages and death-traps and Albert Glasser’s -- Beginning of the End (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), eerie electronic score, which was once more cranked up to about eleven, their efforts more than overcompensate for Hill’s shaky, misdirecting script, resulting in something rather unique that is hard to explain let alone define.
I honestly wouldn’t know where to begin to try and decipher all the strange imagery and symbolism that permeates this film. I mean, What was that white horse all about? And the dead seagull? Or that whole kite thing? (You'll know it when you see it.) But the best and most jolting stream of images comes during De Quincey's attempted getaway while under the phantasmagorical influence of the opium.
Here, Glasser’s sinister score suddenly drops out, and after a slow-motion roof-top chase, a talking bird is shot, which detonates in a cloud of feathers, and then brace yourselves for the scene in the butcher’s shop and the decapitated boar’s head. Again, What in the good-god-hell was that all about?!
I’m also convinced Confessions of an Opium Eater had at least some influence on John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986). And this is not a slight, nor should it be construed as a knock for theft on Carpenter's film. No sir. I enjoyed the heck out of that movie, too, but there are just far too many similarities to deny the obvious, right down to the earnest but completely in-over-his-head hero.
As a proto-Jack Burton, Vincent Price does seem a bit out of place as an action hero, but he handles it rather deftly -- hell, anything the guy does is good; and he would do it again a couple years later in The Last Man on Earth (1964), which I still contend was the best adaptation of Richard Matheson's pulp-classic, I Am Legend. Linda Ho was equally great as the vicious Ruby Lo, as was Yvonne Moray as the pithy Baby Doll. The rest of the cast -- Richard Loo, Phillip Ahn, June Kyoto Lu, Caroline Kido, were all fine but their characters were sold short by that script as filmed.
I first encountered Confessions of an Opium Eater some thirty years ago, as Souls for Sale, when it brought up the rear of an overnight triple-feature on TNT with The Giant Behemoth and The Hypnotic Eye (1960) -- back in the glory days of Monstervision and 100% Weird. And while it has since made the digital leap through the Warner Archive, I still have that VHS tape and treat it like a museum piece; a reminder of how awesome the SuperStations used to be instead of the infomercial whores they are now. Still, I am thankful and will always be grateful to the network for introducing me to this bona fide gonzo classic, and I encourage you all to catch up with it, too, as soon as possible.
Confessions of an Opium Eater / Souls for Sale (1962) Photoplay :: Allied Artists / P: Albert Zugsmith / AP: Robert Hill / D: Albert Zugsmith / W: Robert Hill, Thomas De Quincey (novel) / C: Joseph Biroc / E: Robert Eisen, Roy Livingston / M: Albert Glasser / S: Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, June Kim, Philip Ahn, Caroline Kido
Wow....never heard of this one great background info! I feel queasy just looking at the pics...gotta check it out
ReplyDeleteIt's a kooky one alrighty. Thanks for reading!
ReplyDelete