Black Eye (Pat Rooney Productions, Jerry Buss Presentations, Warner Bros., 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 23) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good 1974 “Blaxploitation” movie called Black Eye, the first of two collaborations between director Jack Arnold and star Fred Williamson. I somehow missed this on Turner Classic Movies during their night of showing films featuring real-life Black athletes, including the Harlem Globetrotters, Muhammad Ali (who played himself in a 1977 biopic called The Greatest, for which the song “The Greatest Love of All,” later a hit for Whitney Houston, was written), and 1950’s tennis star Althea Gibson (in the John Ford/John Wayne/William Holden Civil War vehicle The Horse Soldiers, which we actually watched together as it aired on TCM at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-horse-soldiers-mirisch-corporation.html). Williamson was a defensive back for the American Football League before its 1970 merger with the National Football League; he played for the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs (as well as one season with the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers). As a Chiefs player he was in the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967, though his team lost to the Green Bay Packers 35-10. Williamson made his film debut in 1972 with a Blaxploitation Western called The Legend of Nigger Charley (the “N-word” featured prominently in many of Williamson’s film’s titles), and by 1974 he was a well-established attraction for Blaxploitation audiences. (“Blaxploitation” was the genre terms for films, mostly cheap exploitation movies with low budgets and schedules, aimed at the Black audiences after changing patterns of urban settlement had left many of the great movie palaces of the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s in neighborhoods whose populations were now mostly Black. The new residents of these areas naturally wanted to see films about people who looked like them.)

I was interested in Black Eye – a punning title signifying that the male lead was an African-American private investigator – mainly because of its director, Jack Arnold. He’d been a contractee at Universal-International in the 1950’s and had made a number of quite good films, including the first two movies in the Creature from the Black Lagoon sequence as well as It Came from Outer Space (a quite chilling flying-saucer adventure based on an outline and suggested dialogue by Ray Bradbury), This Island Earth and the flawed but haunting The Space Children. Fortunately, Arnold was also no stranger to film noir, as he’d done noirs at Universal like The Glass Web and The Tattered Dress (not The Tattooed Stranger, a film I’ve mistakenly attributed to Arnold even though Edward Montagne was the actual director). Later that year Arnold and Williamson would team up again for a Blaxploitation Western called Boss Nigger – a title that raised some hackles then and even more now. Barbara Leigh, who played the film’s main white role, schoolteacher Miss Pruitt, insisted on calling the film Bossman and when it was issued on VHS and then on DVD the title was abbreviated just to Boss. The plot of Boss Nigger has been compared to that of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles – a straight-shooting Black sheriff comes to tame a lawless Western town – only Arnold and Williamson (who wrote the script as well as starring) intended it seriously.

Black Eye was written by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin based on a novel by Jeff Jacks called Murder on the Wild Side, and though the pioneering Blaxploitation film, Gordon Parks’s Shaft, had also featured a Black private eye, John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), the concept was still relatively novel (Walter Mosley’s first Black detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, wouldn’t be published until 1990). The film opens with a weird prologue featuring a clip from a (fictional) silent film from the late 1920’s in which a woman and her extra-relational lover are surprised by the husband; he takes out a gun to shoot him, but she stands between them and takes the bullet originally meant for her boyfriend. Then we cut to the 1974 present and the funeral of the legendary star of this film, who was famous for always carrying around a silver-handled cane. Only a woman shows up at the gravesite and steals the cane just before the star’s coffin is laid in the ground. She turns out to be a prostitute, Vera Brownmiller (Nancy Fisher), who regularly serviced the star as one of her tricks. Vera stole the cane at the behest of Chess (Frank Stell, later known as Frank Ashmore), only Chess, who’s easily the hottest, hunkiest male in the film of either color (methinks Williamson, Arnold, producer Jerry Buss – who as longtime owner of the Los Angeles Lakers also had a major association with Black athletes – and their casting directors were blazing the trail later followed by the Lifetime producers of having the hunkiest man be the villain), breaks into Vera’s apartment, kills her and steals the cane. Black Eye has a rambling plot line featuring Shepherd Stone (Fred Williamson), a chronically broke Black P.I. who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for being too hot-headed; his former LAPD commanding officer, Lt. Bill Bowen (Richard X. Slattery); his Black girlfriend, Cynthia (Teresa Graves); her Lesbian affair partner, Miss Francis (Rosemary Forsyth), who’s so polymorphously perverse she not only has a man she’s married to but also has the hots for Stone when they meet; and Dole (Richard Anderson), who hires Stone to find a runaway teenager he says is his daughter Amy (Susan Arnold).

Stone traces Amy to a religious cult led by Rev. Avery (Larry D. Mann), who takes young runaways off the street and converts them to Jesus-freak Christianity. In one of the film’s most grimly amusing sequences, Amy accosts a middle-aged Jewish woman on the beach where the cult is doing mass baptisms and tries to convert her on the spot – and she couldn’t be less interested. Gradually it dawns on Stone that there must be something in that cane that has attracted the attention of a lot of nasty crooks, though when he takes the top off and opens it he realizes it’s just a hollow tube of metal. Stone chases a young white male dope dealer up a tree – literally – to get the information about Amy’s whereabouts (beating and roughing up drug dealers was one of the offenses that got him fired from the LAPD). There’s a quite amusing sequence in which Stone and Cynthia are on the beach together in what looks like a playful date; he’s dressed in loose-fitting white pattern swim trunks (which show off a quite impressive basket) and she’s in a two-piece swimsuit and is carrying a lime-green toy football in the film’s one reference to Williamson’s former career. There’s also a sequence in which Stone is trapped inside an elevator shaft by people he met at a party being thrown by Miss Francis (who once again makes a play for Stone) at which he’s assailed by four men who want to kill him for the cane (ya remember the cane?). And there’s a plot digression involving a character called Talbot Talbot (Cyril Delavanti), a psychic and Tarot card reader who was supposed to perform at Miss Francis’s party, only someone killed him before he could do so. There’s also a scene in which Stone is in his favorite bar, whose owner has comped him to the point where he’s run up a $200 tab, only the bar owner is roughed up by a team of four thugs in search of the whereabouts of that mysterious cane.

Eventually it turns out that the cane once contained $500,000 worth of pharmacologically pure heroin; that the drugs were provided by a smuggling ring who reached out to various people, including the silent-era film star, got them addicted to drugs and then forced them into being the gang’s mules in exchange for continued supplies; and the mastermind of all this is Dole. Stone brings Amy to the beach where the cult is doing the mass baptism and introduces her to Dole, who says he’s her father. “You’re not my father! Jesus is my father!” she insists, and just as we’re about to write her off as a typically brainwashed cult member, we realize that Dole isn’t Amy’s father. He was just posing as her dad so Stone would find her; he’s really the man behind the drug ring, and he’s after Amy because she and her cult boyfriend previously discovered the heroin hidden in the cane, stole it, and planned to sell it on the streets to raise money for the cult. Ultimately Stone corners Dole on a pier and, as the official police led by Lt. Bowen arrive ready to arrest Dole, Stone pushes him off the pier and tells Bowen, “You’re going to have to do some swimming to get him.” Then he and Cynthia run off together to the strains of a pop-soul ballad sung by a quite good woman singer which we heard earlier in the scene of Stone and Cynthia cavorting on the beach. This song isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page and the only online information I’ve been able to find about the music is about the background score composer, Mort Garson, a pioneer of electronic synthesizers. Though it suffers from the oddly disjointed plot and also from the cartoon-ish violence Blaxploitation producers and audiences insisted on – in one fight scene set in Cynthia’s apartment Charles joked that all her furniture was breakaway – Black Eye is actually pretty good neo-noir. Like The Horse Soldiers, it’s not a masterpiece but it’s a genuinely entertaining film that holds audience interest (it held mine, anyway). It also benefits from having been shot exclusively on L.A. locations (featuring glimpses of the city a half-century ago, including neighborhoods that have radically changed as well as ones that are pretty much the same) and from Fred Williamson’s highly personable and surprisingly credible acting.