The Hypnotic Eye (Bloch/Woodfield Productions, Allied Artists, 1960)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 18) my husband Charles and I watched a quite intriguing and entertaining movie I’d stumbled across on the Turner Classic Movies Web site but it was scheduled at an inconvenient time: The Hypnotic Eye, made in 1960 by Bloch/Woodfield Productions for release by our old friends Allied Artists, nèe Monogram. The Hypnotic Eye was written by William Read and Gitta Woodfield (I’m guessing they were husband and wife but there’s no indication of that on imdb.com, and apparently William was mostly a still photographer – he took pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the set of her last film, the uncompleted Something’s Got to Give – and also an amateur magician, a background that’s readily apparent in this film) and directed by George Blair. Blair had been a house hack at Republic Pictures and in that capacity had made the only film of his I’ve seen previously, the 1949 Daughter of the Jungle (which made the Harry Medved/Randy Dreyfuss/Michael Medved book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time; I’d seen it in the early 1980’s on Schlock Theatre, a local San Diego show that was the precursor to Mystery Science Theatre 3000; the main difference is that the snarky comments about the films were shown as subtitles rather than spoken over the dialogue, and when one of the characters in Daughter of the Jungle said, “He’s acting rather strangely!,” the subtitle read, “This is the only time anyone has ever mentioned acting in connection with this film”). The Hypnotic Eye was also ballyhooed as being in a new process called “HypnoVision,” which wasn’t a cinematic gimmick but meant that in his lead role as super-hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac, a French actor who was briefly married to Ginger Rogers and Dorothy Malone and whose French accent sounded hard to accept from a character with an Anglo name), Jacques Bergerac spoke to the camera directly and gave the audiences, both on screen and in the theatre, simple hypnotic suggestions.

Surprise: The Hypnotic Eye actually turned out to be quite good, hardly a great film but a solidly entertaining one despite some massive plot holes of which the Woodfields should have been ashamed. It begins with an otherwise anonymous woman preparing to wash her hair, only what she thinks is a shower is in fact a gas stove burner going full blast. She badly burns her face and ultimately dies in the hospital, but not before police detective sergeant Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge, an actor so obscure imdb.com list him but doesn’t have a head shot) has a chance to interview her. She had no idea why she tried to wash her hair on a stove burner, but it turns out she’s just the 11th in a series of young, previously attractive women who have mutilated their faces in similar ways with no idea afterwards of why they’d done it. Kennedy enlists the aid of psychiatrist Dr. Philip Hecht (Guy Prescott), who suggests that the women may have been victims of a hypnotist who used his powers to implant suggestions in their minds that led to their self-mutilations. Kennedy, his girlfriend Marcia Blaine (Marcia Henderson), and her friend Dodie Wilson (Merry Anders) go to a local show featuring Desmond and also his tall, blond, statuesque assistant Justine (Allison Hayes, who was in a lot of cheapie horror “B”’s in the late 1950’s and attracted a major following as the lead in the 1958 film Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, about an ordinary housewife who’s enlarged to the titular size by a giant space alien who has a crush on her and wants to scale her up). Kennedy is skeptical about the whole idea of hypnosis and is convinced that the so-called “volunteers” are merely stooges on Desmond’s payroll, but he learns differently when Desmond is able to levitate Dodie on stage (courtesy of some surprisingly convincing wire work). Then Kennedy invites both Marcia and Dodie to join him for a late-night snack at a local coffee shop, but Dodie begs off and instead goes home. Then she goes to wash her face in her bathroom sink, only the item she pours into the sink is sulfuric acid (clearly labeled as such on its jar, which begs the question why she had a jar of a highly toxic industrial chemical on the ledge of her bathroom sink) and she ends up with her face badly burned.

Kennedy and Hecht visit her in the hospital and, like the other surviving victims, Dodie has no memory of the evening past the point where Kennedy and Marcia left her behind. Later Marcia goes to a Desmond show alone and she’s given a post-hypnotic suggestion to return to the theatre after midnight, where she gets into Desmond’s car and lets him take her home. He hypnotizes her still further with a gadget called “The Hypnotic Eye” ¬– actually a blinking lamp with several lit circles which he gets her to stare at to put her under – and she ends up making out with him, apparently willingly. Meanwhile, Justine is staring at them from across the room with jealousy in her eyes, and for a while I thought that where this film was going was that Desmond was an otherwise innocent man who immorally but legally used his hypnotic powers to get women to have sex with him, and Justine was the bitch who out of jealousy was re-hypnotizing his victims to mutilate themselves. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that they’re both in on it: Justine corners Marcia in the bathroom and tells her to get in what she says is a cold shower but is really hot enough to scald her face permanently. Fortunately Kennedy and Hecht have been following Desmond and Marcia, and Kennedy bursts into the house just before Justine is about to get Marcia into that irreparably hot shower, but Justine hypnotizes Marcia into telling Kennedy that Marcia and Justine are old friends and roommates from school. This finally awakens Kennedy to what’s really going on because he remembers that Marcia never went to boarding school and therefore never had a school roommate. The film climaxes at yet another public appearance by Desmond, who has Marcia in tow. This is the sequence at which Jacques Bergerac faces the camera directly and does his “Hypno-Vision” suggestions, including giving each audience member a white balloon with a picture of an eye stenciled on it. He tells them to blow up the balloon and says it’s a quite heavy object. (Charles, who studied hypnosis early on in our relationship, told me that’s a variant of a well-known suggestion in which the hypnotist gets the subject to believe that they’re holding a balloon in one hand and a bowling ball in the other, and the subject raises the hand allegedly with the balloon and lowers the hand allegedly with the bowling ball as they would if they were really holding two objects, one very light and one very heavy.) Kennedy had previously discovered such a balloon on the person of one of the interview subjects he’d talked to who said she’d never been to a hypnotism show, had never been hypnotized herself, and didn’t know anyone named Justine.

As the show breaks down, Justine grabs Marcia and takes her up into the theatre’s catwalks while Desmond gets a gun and tries to use it to hold Dr. Hecht hostage. Kennedy shoots and kills Desmond with his own gun to save Dr. Hecht’s life, while Justine dangles Marcia off the edge of the catwalk (the segment they’re on has detached itself from the rest) and rips off the mask she’s been wearing over her face the whole movie. This reveals that her own face is badly scarred, and she announces that this was the reason she hatched her and Desmond’s plot: she wanted to single out beautiful women and make them as ugly as she is. Kennedy manages to climb onto the catwalk and rescue Marcia, while Justine loses her balance and falls to the floor of the stage, dead. (The Wikipedia page on the film said it was a deliberate suicide, but it looked like an accident to me.) The film ends with Dr. Hecht directly facing the camera to warn the audience that, while hypnotism has legitimate medical uses, they should never allow themselves to be hypnotized except in a medical setting by a doctor or a trained professional. Ironically, in the film’s initial release in some theatres, including the Golden Gate in San Francisco where it premiered, Gil Boyne (true name: Mark Thomas Gilboyne), the film’s technical advisor, performed as an on-stage hypnotist doing live demonstrations like those the film’s character had warned against. (Gil Boyne was actually a psychotherapist in World War II who got interested in hypnotism as a quicker alternative to psychoanalysis and became a pioneer in training medical hypnotists and founder of the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners.) There’s also a fascinating if rather disconnected sequence showing the characters at a beatnik bar with poet Lawrence Lipton (billed as “King of the Beatniks”) performing with a bassist and a bongo drummer. The bongos were played by Ed “Big Daddy” Nord and the scene was supposedly based on the Gas House, his real-life coffeehouse in Venice, California, though it was shot in a studio.

Overall, though it suffers from script problems (we’re supposed to believe that Kennedy doesn’t recognize Justine when he sees her at Marcia’s place even though he saw her before as part of Desmond’s show, and Charles was bothered at how Desmond and Justine both followed and were followed by Kennedy and Hecht and none of them recognized the others) and a couple of scenes that I wished would exceed Charles’s gore quotient (which is even lower than mine), The Hypnotic Eye is a surprisingly good movie, credibly acted and well directed by Blair. Incidentally Kodak used the opening scene of a woman taking what she thinks is a shower and is really the open flame of a gas stove as a demonstration of their new 3-D “lenticular photography” process, printing business card-sized photos of the scene in which the woman’s face lit up as you rocked the print back and forth. (“Lenticular photography” was famously used on the album cover of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and most recently on a limited-edition LP of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.)