When actor Fred Williamson and director Jack Arnold got here collectively to make “Black Eye” in 1974, it wasn’t an apparent match.
Williamson was the retired professional soccer participant who, after making his characteristic movie debut in Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H” in 1970, had skyrocketed to blaxploitation stardom in “Hammer” and a pair of Larry Cohen knockouts, “Black Caesar” and “Hell Up in Harlem.” Arnold was a dependable Hollywood journeyman greatest recognized for guiding Common sci-fi flicks like “It Got here From Outer Area,” “The Unimaginable Shrinking Man,” and “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” earlier than spending the Sixties knocking round from studio to studio, style to style, with a financially profitable however creatively static sojourn in episodic tv.
Williamson was a rising star of the New Hollywood and Arnold a kind of discarded remnant of the outdated, however their collaboration yielded one of the vital underrated movies of its period. A wise and very entertaining neo-noir that marries Williamson’s vitality and edge to Arnold’s instinctive knack for motion route to nice impact, “Black Eye” is a richly atmospheric detective movie that deserves to be extra well-known than it’s; its pleasures are much like the canonized “The Lengthy Goodbye” and “Evening Strikes.” Whereas “Black Eye” just isn’t fairly the masterpiece both of these movies is (Arnold is an excellent craftsman however not a full-fledged visionary like Altman or Arthur Penn), it’s shut sufficient to make you surprise why it’s been so forgotten.
Fortunately, a brand new Blu-ray from Warner Archive offers a welcome alternative for rediscovery. I’ve written in regards to the label’s excellent transfers many instances earlier than, and so they’ve accomplished it once more: The “Black Eye” disc is a stunner, presenting Ralph Woolsey’s cinematography in all its gritty and lovely glory. Based mostly on Jeff Jacks’ novel “Homicide on the Wild Aspect,” the film is a Raymond Chandler-esque thriller a couple of detective (Williamson) whose job searching for a lacking woman intersects with a seemingly unrelated case that he stumbles onto when he witnesses the homicide of a neighbor. As with Chandler, the attraction is much less the plot (although the development right here, courtesy of screenwriters Mark Haggard and Jim Martin, is strong) than conduct and placement. Williamson spends the whole film shifting from one L.A. locale and subculture to a different, assembly a motley crew of criminals wealthy, scrappy, and all the things in between, alongside the best way.
“Black Eye” was launched by Warner Bros. in an effort to money in on the blaxploitation craze (although, except for some funky music and the presence of style icon Williamson, “Black Eye” is extra “The Huge Sleep” than “Superfly”), nevertheless it was an unbiased manufacturing, and its low funds is considered one of its virtues. Modest films like this are sometimes higher representations of their time and place than extra well-resourced studio movies, for the reason that incapability to recreate and reshoot means the filmmakers are pressured to easily doc what’s in entrance of them. Such is the case with “Black Eye,” and on this regard, it couldn’t have had a greater director than Arnold.
Arnold started his profession as an apprentice to documentarian Robert Flaherty, and he by no means misplaced his style for capturing life on the fly. “Black Eye” is shot totally on location — there isn’t a set in the whole film — and considered one of its delights is its worth as a time capsule of 1974 Los Angeles, significantly Venice Seashore and Santa Monica. One of many highlights is an unimaginable automotive chase set on the Venice canals; Arnold biographer Dana Reemes claims this sequence was shot with out permits. It’s an astonishing show of directorial craftsmanship during which Arnold integrates the motion and placement so deftly which you can’t think about the sequence going down wherever else.
The film is full of dynamic exteriors that add vitality and texture to Williamson’s adventures, nevertheless it’s within the seedy interiors the place Arnold actually displays his presents. Williamson strikes by way of an countless parade of squalid flats (in addition to higher-end residences the place upper-class individuals within the heroin ring on the film’s middle stay), every of which has its personal distinctive character. In step with custom for this sort of detective story, the film is loaded with quirky supporting characters, every given added depth and taste by their environs, and vice versa.
The movie is impeccably solid from high to backside, with a number of scenes that earn comparability with the masterpiece of this style, Howard Hawks’ “The Huge Sleep.” “Black Eye” has the same love of language, and considered one of its key delights is when Fred Williamson finds himself reverse an actor able to maintaining with him as they interact within the Nineteen Seventies corollary for Hawks’ quick badinage. In a single hilarious scene, Williamson goes head-to-head with “Good Instances” star Theodore Wilson as a restauranteur, and so they reply to one another in rhyme. As in Hawks, the dialogue is extremely stylized however utterly believable within the established universe.
Supporting solid apart, the first cause to observe “Black Eye” is its lead, by no means higher than he was right here — which is saying one thing, since Williamson was one of many nice motion stars of his period. Charismatic and able to conveying bemusement, resignation, and rage with the subtlest of gestures, he ought to have been as large as Clint Eastwood; the truth that he wasn’t in all probability has one thing to do with the siloing of films that includes Black actors as “blaxploitation” even when, as on this case, that they had a lot in widespread with extra well-resourced and extensively marketed movies that includes white stars.
The truth that Stone, the detective performed by Williamson, didn’t get an entire sequence of films like Soiled Harry is a tragedy for motion followers, although we did get an equally nice follow-up to “Black Eye” within the type of 1975’s “Boss Nigger” (whose title, whereas uncontroversial on the time, was understandably modified to easily “Boss” by the point it made its approach to DVD in 2008), a rousing Western written by Williamson and directed by Arnold. And, in fact, Williamson gave us dozens of terrific motion films within the years to come back as star, author, and, finally, director.
Whereas Williamson was in the beginning of his profession in “Black Eye,” Arnold was in his twilight — his closing movie, “The Swiss Conspiracy,” can be launched solely two years later. Like Williamson, Arnold is well-regarded amongst style followers however not almost as well-liked as he should be given the consistency of his work. “Black Eye” is the proper place to find or rediscover him, Williamson, and the gloriously sleazy west L.A. of 1974.
“Black Eye” is now accessible on Blu-ray from Warner Archive.