User Reviews

***SPOILERS*** A nicer and less radical Fred Williamson is down in the dumps private eye Shep Stone who gets himself involved in a drug ring that uses religion as a front to push its sh*t to the public;especially the hippie and disgruntled youth by claiming to save them. Stone gets involved in all this by being hired by Mr. Dole, Richard Anderson, to track down his hippie teenage daughter Amy,Susan Arnold,who joined the religious cult in order to find herself and ended up pushing drugs as well as getting addicted to them.

Stone besides all his other problems, like paying his bills,is stuck with a lesbian girlfriend Cynthia, Tresa Graves, who flaunts her lesbianism in front of him that totally confuses him and makes him feel, can it be possible, inadequate with the opposite sex. Stone's involvement in all this happened when he obtained this silver tipped walking stick that once contained 50 G's of heroin in it from Hollwood memorabilia collector Bowen, Richard X. Battery, who left it at the cemetery while attending a funeral.

It was hooker Vera, Nancy Fisher, who swiped it while the absent minded Bowen forgot to pick it up and ended up getting murdered by hit-man Chess, Frank Ashmore, who Bowen hired to retrieve it. This not only ended with Bowen later losing the walking stick and its contents but his life as well.

***SPOILERS*** Williamson does his best to keep this turkey of a movie afloat with a number of fight and car chase scenes but its the plot that's too long and complicated for anyone to follow that ends up sinking it. We do get what seems like a surprise ending and climatic chase scene in the beach that exposes the real bad guy in the movie who ends up getting dumped by Stone in the Pacific Ocean. The biggest surprise is not who the drug kingpin is but who he isn't.

Made when the 1970s blaxploitation genre had reached its peak, this independently made production got picked up by a major Hollywood distributor. The distributor may have picked it up because they reasoned that since "Shaft" - about a black private eye - was a hit a few years earlier, lightning might strike twice. But I'm pretty sure that most people who saw the movie were kind of let down. Despite being about a black private eye getting tangled in two complex separate investigations that eventually merge, the movie doesn't play out in a way that you'd probably expect. Until the last 20 or so minutes, there's very little action. The movie for the most part moves somewhat slowly, with little spark. Combined with the somewhat cheap production values, viewers in the mood for action and gloss will probably be let down. But in a strange way, the movie does have some compelling features for patient viewers. It is slow and not very exciting, but at the same time it feels a lot more realistic than many other private eye movies of the time (blaxploitation or not). And Fred Williamson, playing the lead, does give his character some (believable) charisma and makes his character also palatable by showing he's not a superman (though he is believably smart and resourceful.) If you are looking for standard blaxploitation thrills, look elsewhere. But if you are interested in the idea of an offbeat 1970s black private eye movie and are in a patient mood, you might find the movie has its rewards.

Towards the end of his career Jack Arnold, a very efficient director who gave us such classic 50's creature features as "It Came from Outer Space," "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," and "Tarantula," teamed up with former football star turned top 70's blaxploitation film headliner Fred "the Hammer" Williamson for a pair of movies, producing the amiable, if unremarkable Western "The Black Bounty Hunter" and this refreshingly breezy, clever and highly entertaining 70's black action variant on your standard 40's film noir down-at-the-heels private detective yarn.

Williamson displays a charming combination of dry, self-deprecating humor and relaxed, easygoing self-confidence as Shep Stone, a cheap, affable, and forever in debt erstwhile Los Angeles cop turned private investigator. Stone's so hard-up for cash that he uses a bar as his business office and just barely makes ends meet doing penny-ante low-paying minor cases that the police don't want to bother with. While pounding the pavement for one of these deceptively simple gigs (Stone's trying to find some guy's runaway teenage daughter who's hiding somewhere in Hollywood), Stone finds himself elbow deep in a complex, dangerous, seemingly bottomless criminal plot which includes a flipped-out Jesus freak religious cult, assorted deadhead hippie dopers, a sordid porno ring, a priceless missing gold-tipped cane that belonged to a legendary silent movie star, a nefarious underground drug smuggling operation, and an ever-growing number of fresh corpses.

While lacking the wickedly playful, mischievous ingenuity of Robert Altman's masterful "The Long Goodbye" or the haunting, unremitting pessimism of Arthur Penn's beautifully bleak "Night Moves," "Black Eye" nonetheless still makes the grade as a highly successful hip'n'flip 70's spin on 40's mystery suspense thrillers. Arnold's capable direction keeps the pace moving at a nice, steady clip, punctuated with sporadic exciting mano-a-mano bare knuckle fight scenes and excellent use of various colorfully seedy L.A. locations (the rundown abandoned amusement park at the film's conclusion is especially effective). The script by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin supplies a goodly amount of fairly complicated and often genuinely surprising plot twists. And the expected array of quirky, rough-around-the-edges secondary characters are an interesting oddball bunch, with particularly notable turns by Rosemary Forsyth as an alluring, powerful lesbian model agency owner (Forsyth has the picture's best line, boasting to Stone when she first meets him, "I'm a whole lot of woman"), Teresa Graves of "Get Christie Love" TV show fame as Stone's loyal bisexual girlfriend (the film's casual, nonjudgmental depiction of both Foryth's unconventional femme fatale and Graves' equally atypical gal Friday is one of its strongest assets), and Bret Morrison, who did the voice of radio's "The Shadow" in the 40's, as a smugly sleazy porno filmmaker. All in all, it's a modest, yet surefire winner.