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.
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