Quick Cuts

By J.C.

THE BLACK WINDMILL. At the beginning of this odd, superior little thriller, a British intelligence agent (played with impeccable sangfroid by Michael Caine) discovers that his son has been kidnaped. The ransom demand is well over a million dollars worth of uncut diamonds--exactly the amount that Caine's intelligence unit was about to use to counter an arms-smuggling plot. The fact that the kidnapers know precisely what sum to ask for means there has been a leak at the highest level of security.

The first half of The Black Windmill, which brings Caine up against the realization that his superiors have no intention of ransoming his son, has the texture of steel. Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) delineates his characters quickly and vividly, with toughness and sly attention to quirks of behavior. Donald Pleasence plays another intelligence officer--a compulsive ferret with eyes like stomped marbles--in a true virtuoso turn. Pleasence, however, gets shuffled to the sidelines during the later portion of the film, and the picture itself changes from a briskly elegant exercise into real Mickey Mouse melodrama.

Caine has to chase all over Paris and sneak back into Britain again in stunts that would give pause even to Ian Fleming. To escape pursuers, he jumps off a high bridge onto a barge which happens to be passing right below. Eluding the law, he scrunches down in the back seat of a bus, where he is conveniently overlooked. It is almost as if Siegel lacked confidence in the measured tension of the first half and went after what is supposed to be a sure thing: a chase and a shootout. The standard formula looks particularly shabby on a film good enough to have broken it.

BLACK EYE. Dim days on the private-investigator scene: a shamus named Stone, cashiered from the force for strangling a dope dealer with his bare hands, lights out after a kinky killer who has disposed of the whore upstairs. Stone (Fred Williamson), who is black, is helped along by a friendly detective (Richard X. Slattery) who is white, and tormented by thoughts of the slinky number on the first floor, who is bi. Stone is made to feel unduly stuffy because the sight of his girl (Teresa Graves) with another woman makes him queasy. She sets him straight, though, without ever really getting straight herself. "Remember," she says of their intermittent affair, "we had a deal: no ties."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this otherwise sleazy movie is its laissez-faire morality. Private eyes, and movies about them, generally adhere to a moral code so strict that it often looks sentimental. Black Eye remains unruffled about everything from homosexuality and runaway kids to mind-warping evangelism and slaughter in the name of the law. By comparison with Stone, Mike Hammer would look like Lancelot of the Lake.

The movie also contains (Department of Cultural Footnotes) what may be the first slow-motion romp-on-the-beach sequence in which audiences are invited to ogle the male lead rather than the female, as he shakes his stuff in his bathing suit. There is one clear achievement here though: Black Eye is the favorite so far in this year's Best Title sweepstakes. . J.C.

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