The Face of Marble

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.

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

John Carradine appeared in more films than any other actor. Many of them were B-Horrors like this one. But he has such a cool persona, he is able to lift this "been there, done that, return life to the dead" black and white horror film up a notch or two with the help of a largely likable and interesting cast. Carradine plays a doctor whose scientific experiments are bordering on bringing the dead back to life. There is a love triangle mixed into the plot as well as a sinister housekeeper who practices voodoo played to the hilt by wonderful Rosa Rey, who makes a perfectly ominous witch. She is worth the price of admission alone. A great way to spend a little over an hour if you like these kinds of horror movies.

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.

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).