Confessions of an Opium Eater: Albert Zugsmith

A procession of extended "Oriental" dance sequences betray Albert Zugsmith's Confessions of an Opium Eater for what it is: sleaze. But if sleaze were an art form, Confessions of an Opium Eater would have its own exhibit. One film that springs to mind when I think about it is that great accidental masterpiece: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), an almost no-budget noir that created a macrocosm of fear, anxiety, dread, and doom. Both films hide their budgets with clever camera tricks, over-the-top performances, and an aesthetic where the style truly becomes the substance. Loosely, loosely, loosely based on Thomas De Quincey's novel of the same name, the film follows Vincent Price as Gilbert de Quincey, a man who gets pulled into a tong war in nineteenth-century San Francisco concerning opium and the human trafficking of "brides" from China. The entire film feels like a fever dream. The performances (with perhaps the ironic exception of Price's) all feel slightly "off." Many of the actors and actresses behave like they are wind-up robots, particularly during a bombastic opening scene where Chinese women are literally thrown from ship to ship outside of San Francisco. The streets, back alleys, secret passages, and tunnels that spider their way throughout Chinatown take on a sinister, labyrinthine life of their own. Rooms seem to materialize in places they don't belong. One bizarre scene involving a drowned woman asks the audience to believe that the gangsters either have an underground dungeon adjacent to a harbor divided only by a sheet of glass or a ground level dungeon adjacent to a massive water tank. The centerpiece of the film is an exquisite 5-minute slow-motion sequence where Price has to escape from a group of murderers while high on opium. Again, spatial logic is violated when Price jumps through a window in what we thought to be an underground opium den only to reveal that they were on the top floor of a giant building.

8/10