BLACK EYE (Warner Bros, 1974)

D: Jack Arnold. P: Pat Rooney. W: Mark Haggard, Jim Martin. Ph: Ralph Woolsey. M: Mort Garson. St: Fred Williamson (Shep Stone), Rosemary Forsyth (Miss Francis), Teresa Graves (Cynthia), Floy Dean (Diane Davis), Richard Anderson (Raymond Dole)

Given it features interracial lesbianism, heroin smuggling and a visit to a porn studio, you might expect Black Eye to be somewhat salacious. Yet it is almost as tepid as the TV productions with which veteran director Jack Arnold wound down his career. A sense of lethargy inhabits everything from Arnold’s lackadaisical direction to Fred Williamson’s laid-back performance, which never suggests the fiery ex-cop, fired from the force for his hands-on methods, his character is supposed to be.

Now a shamus, Williamson’s Shep Stone is no John Shaft. Neither is this a true blaxploitation picture, notwithstanding its black leads and the occasional racist expletive, so much as a continuation of the second wave of private eye movies that began in the Sixties with the likes of Harper, Tony Rome and Marlowe. (Like the heroes of those films, Stone is a literary creation, originating in a pulp novel by Jeff Jacks called Murder on the Wild Side, the plot of which sounds far racier than this transposition.)In common with these latter-day lone wolves, Stone has old-fashioned ethics (“He’s too goddamn honest”), and a similarly wry attitude towards the seditiousness of the counterculture on the one hand, and the decadence of society’s elite on the other. His sense of humour breaks down, however, concerning the love triangle he is involved in with his on-off black girlfriend, Cynthia, and her wealthy white female lover, the polished Miss Francis.

 

The script leads the hero mechanically through encounters with sundry lowlifes and red herrings, none of whom is eccentric or colourful enough to rise above the level of cypher. The object of his investigations is an antique walking cane – or rather the heroin stashed inside – that once belonged to a silent-film star. (“The name of the game is the cane of pain,” rhymed the posters.) The story threads are stitched together without much subtlety– the first murder victim is a neighbour, Miss Francis is connected to the principal villains, and the missing girl Stone is tracking on the side is sleeping with the man who killed his neighbour. 

Black Eye presents Williamson in a different light. His character is more down-to-earth than the supermen he typically portrayed. Stone is not especially tough or aggressive, just about coming out on top in his (few) fight scenes, and not exactly a stud – he is threatened, rather than titillated, by his lover’s bisexuality; her no-strings mentality is traditionally the preserve of roving male heroes. (This modest progressivism is a feather in the film’s cap.) In some ways it is an unflattering role, but the star never seems discomfited. 

 

 

Too bad this vehicle for his talents never gets off the ground (unlike the vehicles in a late car chase, which betrays an obvious debt to Bullitt). Neither ballsy enough to qualify as blaxploitation, nor seedy or hard-boiled like neo-noir, this is a blander shade of entertainment – film beige, perhaps. It made no impression on the box office, but Arnold and Williamson re-teamed a year later for the western Boss Nigger, a much livelier affair – in part, at least, because it was produced by the independent Dimension Pictures, which specialised in action and exploitation fare.
Kevin Grant