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I saw this flick in 1946 as a 12-year-old, and found it pretty scary. Darkly black-and-white (most films were black and white then). What I remember most was that the faces of the dead revived didn't look like marble at all. Scared but disappointed. John W. Hall

Monogram Studios, director William "One Shot" Beaudine, and horror/character actor icon John Carradine team up in this fun yet implausible offering called The Face of Marble. The story deals with really two strands of plot that come together at the end. One strand tells the story of John Carradine and his young male assistant working on a way of bringing life back to life once dead. The scientific logic is weak, yet executed very nicely. The other story deals with a love triangle between Carradine, his assistant, and Carradine's wife who has fallen in love with the assistant. Carradine's wife(played by Claudia Drake) also happens to have a very "loyal" servant from Africa trained in the black arts. This servant's name is Maria, and she is the very personification of wickedness as she stops at nothing to satisfy her mistress and her own evil ends. Rosa Rey plays Maria and does a real fine job capturing and creating an atmosphere of foreboding and doom. The rest of the acting is all very acceptable. Carradine actually gives a nice, restrained performance as a somewhat misguided but basically good man. Considering the budgetary concerns, this little film is quite good. Some of the special effects are very innovative. The huge Great Dane that becomes a ghost and walks through windows and doors howling in the night is particularly effective and creepy.

From the TIMELESS HORROR set, this review will focus on THE FACE OF MARBLE which is the one rare title in the set and was another seminal B movie horror from my childhood. It is also the only one of the 4 movies to have been made by Monogram, one of the legendary Poverty Row studios. A number of reviews have complained about the quality of the picture compared with the other three. It's definitely inferior but I'd be willing to bet that it may be the best there is.

Monogram Pictures evolved into Allied Artists in the early 1950s and a number of Monogram titles (unless they were Bela Lugosi or the East Side Kids/Bowery Boys films) seem to only exist in worn 16mm prints. While not ideal, this print is way better than the various public domain VHS copies that I have had over the years. I'm sure this copy comes from the TCM library which usually has the best available prints. All of these movies were released by or belong to United Artists whose movie library is now part of MGM whose films belong to Warner Brothers who owns virtually every old movie out there

Back to THE FACE OF MARBLE itself. This Halloween, in addition to watching several Peter Cushing movies, I've been focusing on movies that made a big impact on me as a child and FACE OF MARBLE was one of them. This is one of John Carradine's early mad doctor roles and here he seems more unlucky than misguided. The idea of reviving the dead was a scary one to my young sensibilities and then for them to have the "face of marble" just totally spooked me as did the ghost dog Brutus.

Even at that early age, I could feel the sense of doom and melancholy that pervades the film aided by a really downbeat background score. I felt sorry for Carradine as he really loved his wife and didn't deserve what happened to him. I knew Robert Shayne from the SUPERMAN TV series so there was a connecting thread that I could relate to. By then I was able to recognize performers from other shows and pictures. Watching it again brought back some of those childhood emotions. While the print may not be great, it IS great to have it on DVD along with the others in a nice, convenient package.

The other three movies in this set include Richard Boone's I BURY THE LIVING (1958) which is reviewed elsewhere on this blog, THE SNAKE WOMAN (1961) about an English village girl who can transform herself into a cobra, and THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959) that tells a story of a family curse that involves Amazonian witch doctors and shrunken heads. They are all available individually or as part of other collections...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

1946's "The Face of Marble" ended Poverty Row Monogram's run of genre titles since Bela Lugosi's "The Human Monster" in 1940. John Carradine had previously headlined 1943's "Revenge of the Zombies," conceding that Monogram paid higher wages ($3000 per week) than all the other Hollywood studios of the period, also featuring in "I Escaped from the Gestapo," "Return of the Ape Man," "Voodoo Man," and "Alaska." "Zombies" was a straight up remake of the 1941 "King of the Zombies, "with a very low key performance from the actor, while "Marble" is quite different; for one thing, his Dr. Charles Randolph is not depicted as a typical mad scientist but a rational and quite likable one with dedicated sidekick, Robert Shayne a good six years older though playing a younger assistant (he'd get the top slot by 1953's "The Neanderthal Man"). These experiments in raising the dead through a special serum coupled with bursts of electricity are intended to benefit mankind, but the drowned sailor fails to respond accordingly. Randolph next decides that his wife's beloved Great Dane would be perfect, but the dog becomes a vicious beast capable of walking through walls and thirsting for blood. With his wife secretly in love with Shayne, and a voodoo practicing housekeeper determined to make her mistress happy, it shouldn't come as a surprise that both Randolphs come to a bad end. The script is simply a mess, but it shapes up as Carradine's best Monogram horror, not returning to the genre until the 1956 all star entry "The Black Sleep."

Totally engrossed in his project to bring the dead back to life, Dr. Charles Randolph (John Carradine) fails to notice his wife Elaine's interest in Randolph's young lab partner, Dr. Cochran.

The sound and picture of this film need serious clean up, if possible. And there is some strange, latent racism here. But beyond those issues, there is a lot of horror potential -- reviving the dead, voodoo and a lab with electricity going everywhere. Randolph fits the idea of a "mad scientist" perfectly (but with less wild hair).

Some scenes are hard to follow because of how dark the picture is, but the story is decent, and if there was a way to fix this up, I would increase my rating.