Blaxploitation Education: Black Eye

Fred Williamson as a private detective navigating the L.A. underworld should have been more interesting than this.

Black Eye
Written by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin
Directed by Jack Arnold
1974

Since one of the most famous Blaxploitation heroes was a private detective, it’s not surprising that other movies would try to take another bite of that apple. But there’s a reason there’s one Black private dick who people think of when they hear that phrase, and it’s that the movie surrounding him was highly entertaining, with a charismatic lead performance, an instantly iconic theme song, and an enjoyable plot. While Black Eye might be a decent attempt at recreating that magic, it only manages to partially satisfy one of those criteria, although it must be said that while Fred Williamson is almost always worth watching, he’s done much better work elsewhere.

The movie is based on the novel Murder on the Wild Side, by Jeff Jacks, and it’s one of those Los Angeles noir stories where a private detective navigates the seedy underbelly of the city (maybe Robert Altman’s adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel The Long Goodbye, which came out the previous year, was another inspiration). Unfortunately, the plot that this detective, who is usually just referred to as Stone, navigates isn’t especially compelling, even if it does feature elements like porno movies, drug smuggling, and Jesus freaks.

Part of the problem is that the movie is kind of unfocused, with much of Stone’s detective work involving stumbling into situations that are relevant to the ongoing plot. There’s an odd prologue featuring people watching a silent movie, which you can tell is happening in the past because everything is black and white and the street is filled with old-timey cars. The sole purpose of this is to introduce us to the star of that movie, who, once things shift to the 1970s, we learn has recently died. The real plot kicks off when his cane with a silver handle featuring a dog’s head is stolen from his grave, becoming the McGuffin that various people are searching for.

As mentioned, Stone himself stumbles into this plot accidentally when he returns home to his apartment after getting shot down by the downstairs neighbor he’s been sleeping with. He happens to notice some movement in the apartment of another neighbor, a sex worker named Vera who had stolen the cane. Seeing that her door is open, he goes inside to investigate, where he’s attacked by a thuggish blonde guy who was there to get the cane. The two of them have a fight before the blonde guy escapes with the cane (but not before hurling a few racial slurs in Stone’s direction).

Interestingly, where other movies might have had Fred Williamson easily prevail in a fight like this, he doesn’t really have the upper hand here. He seems less like an action hero and more like a guy who gets in over his head all too often. We learn that he’s working as a private detective because he got kicked off the police force for beating up drug dealers too often. But without the authority that a badge provides him, he’s not so good at coming out on top of these types of scuffles. This makes him more of a stereotypical noir character who is always getting beaten up than a Blaxploitation hero who is ready to take on all comers and prevail.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the movie doesn’t give Williamson enough material to make this character distinctive. He gets hired to try to find an actress who had recently gone missing, and while he asks around and finds some potential leads, the case really only heats up once he tracks down her boyfriend, a guy named Chess, and he turns out to be the blonde guy from earlier. He also finds the cane, meaning that a bunch of other underworld players are now after him so they can get their hands on it. However, one of the first ones to confront him doesn’t have to do too much to force him to turn over the cane, so he’s back at square one.

With everyone so keen to get their hands on this cane, it must contain something special, right? Nope, it’s just drugs, which it turns out the girl Stone was looking for had anyway. When he finds her, she’s in the middle of a mass baptism scene on a beach, and she spends a bunch of time haranguing some poor woman about Jesus (even after the woman protests, saying she’s Jewish). And then there’s a fight scene in which Stone seems to have developed much more impressive physical skills over the course of the plot, allowing him to prevail, even if he ultimately finds the victory to be pretty hollow.

I don’t feel like going into the plot in too much detail here, primarily because it failed to keep my interest most of the time. It all seemed like rudimentary private detective stuff, with the occasional minor scuffle or gun being pulled on someone in an attempt to liven things up. There’s a decent car chase at one point, but for the most part, it’s just various criminal types trying to find an object and nobody really knowing what’s going on until the time comes for someone to explain the plot to us.

There are a few interesting bits lurking around the edges of the movie. In that early scene where Stone is disappointed after showing up at the door of Cynthia, the woman he’s been seeing (Teresa Graves, who was in That Man Bolt and who would later star on the TV show Get Christie Love!), she’s busy because there’s another woman in her apartment who is after the same thing he is. Bisexuality was probably a fairly risque subject at the time, but the movie seems pretty okay with it. In fact, when Stone confronts Cynthia about the situation, showing that he’s unhappy about her sleeping with another woman, she reasonably says that they had agreed to keep things casual, so he shouldn’t care who she decides to sleep with. He’s reluctantly forced to agree.

Of course, this prompts Stone to decide that he does want to get serious with her, so heteronormativity prevails. And this also leads to a scene that I find hard to believe audiences at the time actually liked, in which the two of them play together on the beach, chasing each other around in slow motion while corny romantic music plays. It’s incredibly cringey, and it seems like there’s no way people should have been okay with this, but Black Belt Jones contained a similar scene, indicating that it was somehow acceptable. I guess times change, and what seemed normal to some is weird to later generations, but this is the kind of thing that anybody watching even a few years later is likely to find embarrassing.

I was also somewhat disappointed to see that Stone’s race didn’t really factor into the plot. Aside from one or two bad guys who use racial slurs, he’s treated like any other L.A. private detective would be, whether he’s meeting with shady underworld figures or attending high society parties. There’s one notable scene where he visits a small diner run by a Black man to ask some questions about the girl he’s looking for, and the guy convinces him to stick around and eat a soul food dinner. Stone seems to relish the opportunity to experience some Black culture and connect with someone who has similar roots, but this is just one moment that quickly gets forgotten as the plot plods on.

While I’m always on the lookout for hidden Blaxploitation gems, I’m sorry to say that this isn’t one of them. It’s not terrible; instead, it’s mostly just pretty bland, and it’s a waste of Fred Williamson’s charisma. I’m sure a few more private detective movies will come along before I’m finished with this project, but even if they’re not great, I’m really hoping they’ll at least be more distinctive and memorable than this one was.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod