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.
The Capsule Critic 