The Face of Marble

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.

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.

For a horror movie, it's pretty hard to come up with a fresh version of reviving the dead. Here well-intentioned scientist Carradine wants no monsters, just an opportunity to give folks a second chance. Of course, things turn out otherwise, when a revived mastiff dog walks through walls on his way to ripping out throats. It doesn't help that creepy housekeeper Maria has her own voodoo plans, while a romantic triangle emerges between Carradine's wife Drake and lab assistant Shayne plus his girl Wriston.

Sound complicated. Yes, too bad the script didn't pare down and concentrate on creepy aspects. And I agree with others—we should see more of Carradine who's quite effective in restrained fashion. On other hand, there are those crackling Frankenstein arcs, better than expected for cheapo Monogram, while the spectral images passing through walls are also well done. However, maintaining a spooky mood with a more boffo ending would have really helped. Then too, I could have used more of the marble faces that are both novel and unsettling. But then, this is a low-budget quickie that still manages a few compensations.

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