In short: Black Eye (1974)

Ex-cop of course turned private eye - as well as beater of drug dealers and protector of prostitutes - Shep Stone (Fred Williamson) stumbles into quite the case. When looking in on prostitute Vera (Nancy FIsher), he only finds her corpse, as well as her murderer. The guy is armed with a knife but also swinging a cane with a special silver handle. We the audience already know that cane belonged to a silent movie star, and Vera stole it from the top of his coffin. After a pretty intense fight, the killer escapes with his cane and most of his bones intact. Shep’s not the kind of guy to let this sort of thing slip, so he convinces his ex-partner in the police to hire him to work the case, instead of the people actually responsible for investigating murders.

Because our hero’s a bit of a multitasker, he also agrees to a second case a couple of hours later. He is to find runaway daughter Amy (Susan Arnold) for a guy named Dole (Richard Anderson). Working the cases – if indeed these are separate cases – will lead Shep through all sorts of very 1974 situations, as seen through the eyes of nearly 60 years old director Jack Arnold.

The late 60s and the 70s didn’t exactly treat low budget movie pro Arnold too well, or perhaps he just never really managed to adapt his sensibilities to the new era of filmmaking. In any case, the non-TV work of late period Arnold always feels to me a bit like the work of a man who is trying his best to follow the contemporary exploitation angles but doesn’t quite have the vocabulary needed to do it convincingly. In Black Eye’s case, all attempts to depict the early 70s life and mores of younger people seem to come from a position of raised eyebrows, the director nearly audibly tutting at homosexuals, lesbians, late hippies, religious zealots, and letting his lead tut right with him. It’s often rather awkward, and could indeed be pretty unpleasant at times if not for the joy it is to watch Fred Williamson at work. Williamson spends much of his time using his nearly proverbial (at least if you’re moving in my circles) laidback swagger to stroll from slightly off kilter scene to slightly off scene as a character you might imagine to be played by James Garner in case of Wiliamson’s unavailability, flirting, pretending to be shocked by stuff my grandmother wouldn’t have been shocked by at the time – and how I love him for so clearly only pretending – and from time to time hitting deserving people in the face.


Every couple of scenes – when the film isn’t suddenly turning into a Sunday afterschool special or spends its time on a slow motion romance montage you gotta see to believe and which incorporates a nearly naked Williamson and later a tandem  – Arnold gets up to more timeless things. The handful of action scenes are mostly spirited and fun, and demonstrate that Arnold still had his old directing chops and just didn’t really warm to his material. Still, if you’re interested in the bodies of work of Arnold and/or Williamson, or want to see a 70s private eye film with a black lead that isn’t really a blaxploitation film, this one has enough good moments to be worth your while.

Curse of the Faceless Man (1958)

A worker discovers a man turned to stone in the ruins of Pompeii. Unlike most stone people, the man we will later learn once was called Quintillus Aurelius (Bob Bryant), is at least still half alive, and tends to get rather grabby with other people's necks only to fall into deep stone(d) sleep again afterwards, which is just the kind of behaviour that makes a murder look like a car accident to the police in this particular movie.

Though he really can't prove anything untoward about the stone man, the director of Naples' Pompeii museum, Dr. Carlo Fiorello (Luis Van Rooten), is discomfited enough by the whole affair to call in the former fiancée of his daughter - also a doctor, and that in a 50s film! - Maria (Adele Mara), snarly-voiced American Dr. Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson). Mallon doesn't believe in walking stone men, but he'll perhaps change his tune in the future, for his new fiancée, the artist Tina Enright (Elaine Edwards), has a peculiar connection to the stone man. Before she even knew he existed, Tina had a dream about, and painted a picture of, Quintillus. Once she has learned he does exist, she feels strangely compelled towards the stone man, and it is pretty clear that he feels drawn towards her as well. Why, one could think Tina is the reincarnated love of his life!

For the lesser movie in a two-fer feature together with It! The Terror Beyond Space, which was of course also shot by Curse's director Edward L. Cahn, who made more films between 1955 and 1959 alone than many directors do in their whole careers, this isn't half bad. At the very least, Jerome Bixby's script's attempt to transplant elements of The Mummy into modern Naples and the site of the former Pompeii (both of course played by the usual places in California) is rather interesting and at times unexpected.

50s monster movies usually don't show quite as much interest for the backstory of their monsters as Curse does. The film's emphasis on its monster as a nearly tragic figure repeating the tragedy that cost him his life two millennia ago is also rather uncommon for its time. Sure, there's the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but otherwise, 50s movie monsters seldom got a foot in the door beyond being monstrous, something that always seemed like a bit of a shame to me.

In its actual execution, Curse isn't all that different from your run of the mill monster movie, though, for while Cahn did hit on a good film or two between the disinterested crap he often did, he really wasn't the man to delve deep into the possibilities the script offers, or really, to delve even very shallowly. What we get from him is a pacy, straightforward film that looks and feels alright, which probably is the best we can hope for under the circumstances of the production.

The film's biggest weak points are the usual ones: heroine Elaine Edwards couldn't act her way out of a paper bag (which is particularly problematic since it's her job to sell us on the reincarnation biz), "hero" Richard Anderson is bland when he isn't rude, while all the much more interesting and much better acted minor characters (like Felix Locher's rather wonderful Dr. Emanuel) never get the moment in the spotlight they deserve. The film is further weakened by a particularly egregious piece of off-screen narration (perhaps done by Morris Ankrum, perhaps not) that won't ever stop telling us the things we are able to see just fine without its help, as if someone involved in the production had problems understanding the difference between a movie and a radio play.

Still, I'll take a competently done 50s horror movie with a handful of underdeveloped good ideas and some rather painful flaws over a boring one any day, so while Curse of the Faceless Man isn't a film I'd recommend whole-heartedly, it is a film with a certain amount of interest.

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