Black Eye (1974)

          Fusing blaxploitation and film noir but suffering from a weak storyline that makes the whole picture feel enervated, Black Eye is a tolerable mystery/thriller featuring a characteristically confident leading performance by Fred Williamson. The movie isn’t a misfire, per se, and it’s got a fair amount of sleaze, so there’s a certain lurid appeal. Nonetheless, nearly everything about Black Eye is second-rate. The characters are all overly familiar archetypes, the central mystery feels murky and unimportant, and the general vibe is that of a disposable TV episode. That said, Black Eye runs a gamut of tonalities. At one extreme, a frothy romantic montage features Williamson’s character and his girlfriend riding a bicycle built for two. At the other extreme, Williamson visits the set of a porno movie to question someone who has valuable information. Oh, and that aforementioned girlfriend? She’s bisexual. So it’s not as if Black Eye is completely bereft of provocative elements.

          The problem is that the filmmakers never commit wholeheartedly to a particular style. The movie is tame one minute, tough the next, and turgid all the way through. The wheezy story begins with the death of an aging screen star in Los Angeles. Someone steals the star’s distinctive walking stick from the star’s casket, setting a Maltese Falcon-type mystery in motion. Who stole the stick? Why is the stick so valuable? And what secrets will the investigation uncover? Also thrown into the mix is a subplot about a desperate father (Richard Anderson) employing Williamson’s character, Stone, to find his missing daughter. And then there’s the whole business of Stone’s relationship with Cynthia (Teresa Graves), who splits her time between romps with Stone and trysts with female lovers. Cynthia’s sexual identity is a source of much consternation for the decidedly heterosexual Stone.

          Complaining that the plot of Black Eye is hard to follow is beside the point, since mystery narratives thrive on confusion and obfuscation, but it’s hard to care much about what happens. Stone has very little personal connection to the case, and the plot threads tethering the missing girl to the walking stick are flimsy. Therefore, Black Eye unfolds as a series of somewhat disconnected scenes, including a chase or two, some fistfights, the occasional sexual encounter, and lots of drab vignettes in which Stone pumps people for uninteresting information. Calling it anything more than passable would require exaggeration.

Black Eye: FUNKY

That Man Bolt (1973)

          Although he’s most closely associated with blaxploitation flicks, swaggering ex-NFL player Fred Williamson began his acting career in mainstream pictures, and he also tried expanding his blaxploitation-era stardom with movies that weren’t aimed solely at urban audiences. Williamson’s biggest such play was almost certainly That Man Bolt, an international crime/espionage thriller that features the actor as a professional courier who comports himself like James Bond. Excepting a brief appearance by Teresa Graves, Williamson is the only black performer with a major role, so That Man Bolt is about as close to a mass-appeal movie as Williamson got during his cinematic heyday. Seeing as how the film didn’t generate a sequel—or trigger the production of further non-blaxploitation projects starring Williamson—it’s safe to say That Man Bolt didn’t set the world on fire during its original release. Nonetheless, this is one of Williamson’s better vehicles simply because the storyline is passable and the 007-esque milieu allows Williamson to flex his charm as well as his formidable physical abilities.

          When the picture begins, ultra-confident tough guy Jefferson Bolt (Williamson) gets bailed out of a Hong Kong prison by a client seeking his services as a courier. The proposed job involves transporting $1 million in U.S. currency from the Far East to Mexico via Los Angeles. Complications ensue because people start trying to kill Bolt—and because Bolt discovers the money he’s transporting is counterfeit. Eventually, the story returns to Hong Kong for a martial-arts showdown between Bolt and an Asian crime lord.
          Since two directors are credited with helming That Man Bolt (Henry Levin and David Lowell Rich), it’s likely that either separate units handled photography on different continents, or that one director replaced the other partway through production. In any event, the look of the piece is generic but relatively slick, with an abundance of extras and location scenes. Some of the martial-arts flourishes are weaker than others (That Man Bolt is yet another ’70s movie featuring a secret school for karate-chopping assassins), but in general the Far East stuff is colorful. In one scene, acupuncture needles are used as torture instruments, and in another, Bolt has fun with his British employer (Byron Webster) by enlisting a heavyset female masseuse to give the man a thorough going-over. However, the energy level of the picture is never quite high enough, even though composter Charles Bernstein juices his orchestral score with occasional funk flourishes. Despite the erratic execution, Williamson keeps things light with his singularly self-assured screen presence.

That Man Bolt: FUNKY

Get Christie Love! (1974)

          Perhaps because the fun of the blaxploitation genre was so intertwined with R-rated nastiness—drugs, pimps, violence, vulgarity—none of the various attempts to created blaxploitation-themed TV series met with much success. For instance, Richard Roundtree reprised his big-screen role as private dick John Shaft for a string of toothless TV movies airing in 1973 and 1974, and singer/actress Teresa Graves starred in Get Christie Love!, an hour-long drama that ran for one season from 1974 to 1975. The mildly entertaining pilot movie for Get Christie Love! shares little in common with theatrical blaxploitation flicks except for an African-American leading actress and an urban-crime milieu. Adapted from a novel by Dorothy Uhnak, the 74-minute feature introduces viewers to Christie Love, a funny, self-confident, and sexy plainclothes detective who works narcotics and vice. Christie spends most of the movie investigating the life of Helena Varga (Louise Sorel), the girlfriend of a high-powered gangster, because an informant’s tip leads police to believe that Helena possesses an incriminating ledger. Even though Get Christie Love! opens with scenes that are suitable for a Pam Grier movie—cops witness the murder of their informant, Christie goes undercover as a prostitute to catch a serial killer—the movie quickly loses its edge.

          As portrayed by the wholesomely pretty Graves, Christie is one-third ass-kicker, one-third bloodhound, and one-third therapist, digging though Helena’s past to find leverage with which she can persuade Helena to help the authorities. The movie includes a few quasi-exciting showdowns, like the bit when Christie judo-throws an assailant off the high balcony of a hotel, but for the most part she gets what she wants via painstaking investigation instead of seducing gullible men or strong-arming beefy goons. In other words, Get Christie Love! ain’t Foxy Brown: The Series by a damn sight. Graves has a pleasant touch for light comedy (no surprise, since she was briefly a regular on Laugh-In), and costar Harry Guardino does what he can with the stock role of an exasperated supervisor. As the pilot for a standard-issue ’70s cop show, Get Christie Love! is harmless enough, and it provides a minor historical footnote because Graves was the first black woman to play the lead on a network drama. (She followed in the footsteps of Diahann Carroll, who broke the sitcom barrier with the 1968 debut of Julia.) As an example of the blaxploitation genre, however, Get Christie Love! is laughably tame.

Get Christie Love!: FUNKY

Old Dracula (1974)

For about the first 15 minutes of its running time, the British-made horror spoof Old Dracula seems as if it might turn into something amusing. David Niven plays a courtly, modern-day version of the famous bloodsucker. Instead of attacking victims in their homes, he allows tours through his castle, “pretends” to be Dracula, drugs his guests, and discreetly drains their blood via IV tubes. Turns out he’s searching for the rare blood type that can revive his undead girlfriend, Vampira. After establishing this passable premise, however, Old Dracula devolves into crass buffoonery. When several Playboy models, one of whom is black, visit Dracula’s castle, the count drains their blood and revives his lady—but thanks to a plasma mix-up, Vampira (Teresa Graves) becomes black. Thereafter, Dracula and his resuscitated companion chase the models across Europe, hoping to find the blood that’s required to “correct” Vampira’s transformation. Sadly, the movie’s cavalcade of insulting stupidity has merely begun. After seeing a blaxploitation movie, Vampira starts talking like a clichéd ghetto click, and then Old Dracula gets bogged down in dull melodrama straight out of a Hammer flick: Caddish swinger Marc (Nicky Henson) tries to save his girlfriend (Veronica Carlson) from Dracula’s clutches, even though Marc is (sort of) under Dracula’s hypnotic spell. Alas, none of this is funny. It’s a bummer to see the eternally charming Niven mired in this dreadful movie, which was originally titled Vampira but renamed to piggyback on the success of Mel Brooks’ 1974 smash Young Frankenstein. Niven is the only top-shelf actor in the picture, and the starlets surrounding him (Graves included) are terrible; furthermore, the storyline drags from one repetitive incident to the next, becoming tackier with each passing scene. Ultimately, Old Dracula makes the mediocre 1979 Dracula spoof Love at First Bite seem sublime by comparison. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Old Dracula: LAME