Review: Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)

Vincent Price stars as 19th century adventurer Gilbert de Quincey, a sailor who helps rescue Chinese slave girls from the Tongs in San Francisco’s Chinatown area. He also imbibes opium from time to time.


A Vincent Price film about Chinese gangs, the slave trade, and opium dens sounds alternately irresistible and horrendously outdated. The outdated part is pretty correct, though crushing boredom more than racial insensitivity is the real culprit here. This 1962 Vincent Price vehicle from director Albert Zugsmith (producer of “Touch of Evil” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, writer-director of a lot of exploitation films) is easily Price’s strangest film but not in any interesting or effective way, at least not for me.


The Joseph Biroc (“It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”, “Blazing Saddles”) B&W cinematography does a foggy good job of making this seem more expensive and artistic than it really is. That and Price’s mellifluous voice have to carry this one as far as possible, and unfortunately that isn’t terribly far. The film is talky, boring, and entirely unconvincing. Price is badly miscast, and seems both bored and uncomfortable with the part. There is nothing in the lead character that suggests that Vincent Price would be appropriate casting here, and I say that as someone who thinks Vincent Price was quite capable of many different roles and many different endeavours. There’s also an absolutely embarrassing ‘yellow face’ performance by Yvonne Moray not only playing an Asian person, but also a child. She was a little person, but she was also around 50 years old at the time and white. It’s hard to take.


The cinematography is outstanding, the film is nonetheless completely lifeless. The 800+ people who have resulted in this having an IMDb rating of 6.2 must either be relatives of the director or opium addicts. The worst Vincent Price film I’ve seen to date of 45 films. Yes, worse than “House of Long Shadows”, and the remakes of “Tower of London” and “Journey Into Fear”. Supposedly based on the work of Thomas de Quincey (whose descendant Price supposedly plays in the film), the screenplay is by Robert Hill (“She Gods of Shark Reef”).


Rating: D+

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