Runtime:
85 minutes
Directed
by: Albert Zugsmith
Starring:
Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, June Kyoto Lu
From:
Photoplay
My apologies but I had to leave before I was able to post it in the afternoon, thus it getting posted in the evening.
Sometimes,
I review some pretty damn obscure movies. This happens to be one of
them. I found out about it on a messageboard, where someone posted a
link to another site that talked about it. It was put out recently by
the online service Warner Archive; I did not see it that way. It's
easily found on the most popular streaming site for free, although I
presume the Warner Archive copy looks better than what is available
on Yo... I mean, that one streaming site.
It's
based on an autobiographical novel from 19th
century author Thomas deQuincey, although the movie is about a later
relative of deQuincey (Price) and his adventures in early 20th
century San Francisco, where you can see someone driving an early
automobile like a Model T and fire a Thompson submachine gun. To copy
and paste the plot from the IMDb, corrected by me: “Gilbert
de Quincey is an early 20th-century adventurer involved with helping
runaway slave girls and victims of a tong war in San Francisco.
Garbed in black from head to toe, de Quincey narrates his adventures.
At the slave auction where beautiful Oriental girls are displayed in
hanging bamboo cages, de Quincey befriends a tiny wisecracking female
Oriental dwarf.”
Yes,
a TINY WISECRACKING FEMALE ORIENTAL DWARF. I can confirm this is the
case; that woman ruled. And this plot is from a movie released 51
years ago! The filmmaking world was so different back then and
something like this got released, where you have Price high on opium
on drug trips, is pretty surprising to me. Also, this movie is pretty
damn weird, in case you coudn't tell already. It took me some time to
get what was going on; it didn't help that the IMDb description
wasn't entirely accurate. But once I got it, I thought this movie was
entertaining. It's more weird than good, but it isn't awful. There is
comedy from all the flowery lyrical dialogue/narration (and situations) and odd
situations you see. The definite highlight was the aforementioned
drug trip that Gilbert goes on, where he smokes some opium, sees a
lot of different animals on the drug trip, and then he has to run
away from the bad guys and to show the effects of the drugs, the film
is in slow motion, which was a nice touch.
As
you can tell from the cast listing, most of the cast is legit
Asian-American actors; that was great for them giving the film
industry back then and how it was common to have white people in
“Yellowface” as Asians. And beforehand I had heard that there
were eerie similarities between this and Big Trouble in Little China.
I hadn't seen the latter in too long but from what I remember, I
understand the comparison as more than once there were parallels.
Someone with Little China must have been familiar with this.
I'll be back Saturday night.
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