Before I get started on The Face of Marble, which I had a good enough time watching, I'll explain why this post is so late. This week I found out that there is a nightmare worse than a zombie apocalypse; the Atlanta Airport. I was stranded there for a considerable part of my week and had a lot of time to contemplate whether I'd prefer to have my brains eaten by zombies or have an extended stay in the Atlanta Airport. I decided on the zombies. At least that death would be quick.
On to The Face of Marble...I must not have the best eye for good and bad film making yet because I was warned to expect something very awful out of director William Beudine but ended up liking the movie. He was known throughout early Hollywood as One Shot Beudine for always using the first take of a scene, good or bad. This efficient style gained him a lot of respect during the silent movie era when only one or two reels of film were used per movie. However when "talkies" were introduced, directors started taking their time to improve the quality of the movie and stopped always using the first take. In the name of profit, Beudine stuck with this method and it showed in most of his later movies. This one was no exception but, up until the end when the story began to go haywire, I didn't have any complaints.
Similar to Voodoo Man, this is another zombie movie where the evil doctor is creating zombies for personal gain but he has a soft side that causes the audience to sympathize with him. Now that I think of it, this movie was almost the exact same thing as Voodoo Man, for the record, I liked Voodoo Man a lot better. There is one advancement in zombie evolution when, at one point, the mad Doctor and his assistant experiment on the family dog and turn him into a zombie. This zombie dog starts eating the neighbors' farm animals which suggests that maybe the human zombies needed to feast on flesh as well. With no zombie features other than a slow pace and wide eyes, these zombies can also walk through walls in addition to craving farm animals.
John Carradine, who played the mad doctor, did an excellent job portraying an evil tyrant with the occasional soft side. It was his obsessive love for his dead wife that caused him to experiment with bringing the dead back to life. He was plagued with his own guilt over doing something immoral all through the movie. Unlike Lugosi and Karloff, Carradine acted in more that just horror films. The patriarch of a large Hollywood family (David Carradine's dad and Martha Plimpton's grandfather), he was best known for playing in movies like The Grapes of Wrath. He did go through a phase in the 40's-60's where he played in mostly horror films, acting in a grand total of 4 zombie films.
There was a small element of voodoo in the very end which contributed the the whole story falling apart. It really wasn't necessary to add this when the story line was strong enough with just the mad doctor. I guess the creators thought it would help get the zombie point across although the word zombie was never actually used in the movie. It could have been One Shot Beudine just not thinking it completely through because he was trying to be efficient. The movie wasn't all that bad and, despite it being the first with an animal zombie eating the living, I'd recommend watching Voodoo Man if you're after a mad doctor zombie movie from the late 1940's thats not too incredibly scary.
Stats for Face of Marble...
Style of zombie: Classic
Threat to humans: yes, and farm animals
Dead or alive: both
How they become zombies: electrocution by a Mad Doctor
Other: first zombie movie with a zombie animal, zombies ate the living in this move as well
How to kill them: any way a human can be killed
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