La cara de mármol

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.

While The Face of Marble will never be confused with a great horror film, it is a decent little movie from the infamously cheap Monogram Pictures and director William Beaudine. John Carradine plays a doctor intent on discovering the secret to bringing the dead back to life. In most scenes, he rises above the material given and delivers a first class performance. The less said about the rest of the cast the better. They can generously be described as wooden and unemotional.

The movie begins with Carradine and his assistant attempting to bring a dead man back to life. After this fails, he tries the procedure on his wife's dog (Carradine's character kills the dog with little or no remorse or care for his wife's feelings). And finally, his wife gets the opportunity to experience the whizzing and sparking machines in his lab. There's also a housekeeper who practices voodoo and has some sort of control over the dog and wife. The housekeeper uses her power to have the dog and wife do her bidding. Under the housekeeper's control, the wife kills Carradine and attempts to kill everyone else in the cast.

For the limited budget, there are actually some good special effects. Some of the scenes where the dog walks through the walls are especially effective. Also, much of the budget appears to have been spent on fancy lab equipment. Carradine has a room full of electronic gadgets similar to those in Frankenstein. The marble effect (from which the movies title comes) is, however, not especially good or memorable.

If you can get past the lackluster supporting performances and the obvious budget constraints, The Face of Marble can be a somewhat fun little film. Not the best, but watchable.

From the TIMELESS HORROR set, this review will focus on THE FACE OF MARBLE which is 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. In the past year, 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 FACE again brought back some of those childhood memories. While the print may not be great, it IS great to have it on DVD...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

This film is distinguished by high-quality high contrast photography. There's little else here in this standard-issue John Carradine mad scientist story, in which Carradine and his assistant manage to resurrect a man, then a large dog, and finally Carradine's wife (at his perhaps obsessed assistant's insistence!). A few interesting plot twists are turned when the script starts to lose its direction (owing in part literally to the director, infamous "One Shot" Beaudine, who probably prided himself on his ethic of efficiency over all artistic or dramatic considerations), but there seems to be no effort to make a really good movie here. Too bad; it just might have been a lot better with some effort (kudos to the actors, though, who all played it straight like Beaudine wanted them to).

Surprisingly atmospheric Monogram entry that features classic horror elements of bringing the dead back to life and voodoo. The story follows two scientists in their attempt to bring the dead back to life. A voodoo housekeeper throws a monkey wrench into their plans. The Great Dane plays a key part to this nifty melodrama.