More Than Meets the Eye: An Eye-Opening Novella, Of a Sense

Introduction: The Eyes Have It

In William Shakespeare's time, it was commonly believed there were five "wits." These five outward wits continue to be regarded as our modern concept of the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Depictions of the five senses as an allegory became a very popular subject for 17th century painters, including Dutch artist Gerard de Lairesse, whose 1668 work "Allegory of the Five Senses" is pictured here.

Sight is represented by the little boy with the convex mirror,
hearing by the cherubic child with the triangle musical
instrument, smell by the girl with flowers in her hand, taste
by the darkly clad woman contemplating a piece of fruit, and
touch by the woman with a bird perched on her upheld hand.

Sight is actually the last and slowest of the five sense to develop in infants. The sense of smell is one of the earliest to develop in a fetus. It is the predominant sense early on, because odors and aromas easily permeate a pregnant woman's water. Touch is also important to babies before they're born, as they use their developing hands and fingers to explore their face and their world in the womb. A human's sense of hearing is up and running before birth, as well. Babies pay attention to sounds outside the womb and recognize their mother's voice. Taste buds are formed fully at birth.

Sight develops gradually over the first six months of life, and by about seven months, a newborn's eyesight is mature, followed by improvements in depth perception and eye-hand coordination.

A common question people pose to one another is, "Which would you rather lose, your sight or your hearing?" Overwhelmingly, most would sacrifice their ability to hear over the gift of sight. In a November 2015 online survey, 5000 people were asked, "Which sense would you give up?" By a sizable margin, 56% said smell, followed by 21% taste, 13% touch, 6% hearing, and, not surprisingly, 4% said sight.

A question we ponder in the Moviehouse is which sense would you give up half of? Which is a sneaky way to segue into an overlooked (pardon the pun) aspect of cinema, both in front of and behind the camera: the world of the single-sighted.


Chapter I: One-Eyed Ogres

"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" is an adage attributed to Erasmus of Rotterdam, a Dutch Renaissance priest-humanist-social critic. It was used by H.G. Wells in his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind," about a mountaineer in Ecuador who descends into a secluded valley inhabited solely by blind villagers who live in windowless homes and navigate streets lined with high curbs, having subsisted for several sightless generations cut off from the rest of the world. The enterprising mountain climber sees an opportunity to rule over the community, but the villagers, who have no concept of sight, don't understand his explanation of the fifth sense. Ultimately, the townspeople propose the removal of the stranger's eyes since they are diseased and affecting his brain, prompting the mountaineer to high-tail it back into the hills, without equipment or provisions but with his sight intact, hoping to find a way back to the outside world.

We'd like to take you back to the time of the ancient Greeks, whose myths - that is to say their religion - frequently contained references to eyes, from any of a number of eyes to the loss of eyesight completely. Argus was a primordial giant with 100 eyes who served as a guardsman in the service of the queen of the gods, Hera.

In one of his many extramarital pursuits, Hera's husband and head honcho on Mount Olympus, Zeus, dispatched Hermes, the messenger of the gods, to dispatch Argus. Hermes cast magic spells that closed the giant's eyes one by one, then slew him with a well-placed rock to the cranium. In honor of her faithful watchman, Hera preserved Argus' eyes forever in the tails of peacocks.

The Graeae, or "grey witches," were three blind sister-seeresses who passed a single eye between themselves. The Greek hero Perseus snatched the eye to coerce the witches to help him on his quest to slay Medusa. Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, stabbed out his own eyes with a pair of brooches when he learned that he had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. The myth of Oedipus also included the presence of Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo who happened to be blind.

Christopher Plummer stars in "Oedipus the King" (1967), a
faithful adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy, first performed in
429 BC. The movie, shot in the ruins of an ancient Greek
theater, featured Orson Welles as the blind seer Tiresias, with
Donald Sutherland (dubbed) as the leader of the Greek chorus.

When it came to eye-gouging, nothing tops the tale of Odysseus (called Ulysses by the Romans) and his crewmen who encountered Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant shepherd on an island of cyclopes, on their voyage back to Greece from the Trojan War.

In the early myths of ancient Greece, the cyclopes, a race of giants each with a single eye in the center of the forehead, were blacksmiths who aided the god Hephaestus, the ironworker of Olympus (pictured above). They forged Zeus' lightning bolts, Hades' helmet of invisibility and Poseidon's trident. Some sources say the legend of the cyclopes stemmed from the practice of blacksmiths wearing a single eye patch to prevent flying sparks from blinding them in both eyes.

As depicted by Homer in the "Odyssey," Polyphemus (pictured above) and his kith and kin were of a different lineage, developing an appetite for human flesh. Trapped in Polyphemus' cave and intended to be devoured, Odysseus tricked the giant into getting drunk on undiluted wine. (The wily Odysseus was the brains behind the Trojan horse that led the way to the sack of Troy.) When the cyclops passed out, Odysseus drove a fire-hardened wooden stick into his eye.

In the 1954 production of "Ulysses," starring Kirk Douglas, Polyphemus was portrayed by Umberto Silvestri (pictured above), an Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler who appeared in several Italian sword-and-sandal epics in the 1950s and '60s.

Nearly six decades later, another burly athlete, former British rugby lock forward Martin Bayfield (pictured below), played the Cyclops Elder in 2012's "Wrath of the Titans," a mash-up of Greek myths tossed together in a slapdash sequel to 2010's "Clash of the Titans," which itself was a remake of the 1981 picture starring Harry Hamlin as Perseus and Laurence Olivier as Zeus. Sam Worthington and Liam Neeson portrayed Perseus and Zeus in the reboots.

Martin Bayfield, who played on England's 1995 World Cup squad,
performed as a stunt double in all of the "Harry Potter" films and
appeared as the young half-giant Hagrid in "Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets."

By the way, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), the loopy, picaresque road movie directed by siblings Joel and Ethan Coen, was, so they tell us, inspired by Homer's "Odyssey," illustrated by the name of George Clooney's character, Ulysses Everett McGill; the appearance of seductively singing sirens; and, among other allusions, John Goodman's cyclopean role as an ogrish, one-eyed Bible salesman (pictured below).

That trash compactor of direct-to-video refuse called the SyFy Channel presented a sympathetic (yet sloppily computer-animated) portrait of the mythical cyclops in the same-titled 2008 movie, featuring an over-the-top performance by Eric Roberts as the evil Emperor Tiberius (the real-life great-grand uncle of Nero).

Apparently, a diaper-clad cyclops pursues Little Red Riding Hood
in 2008's "Cyclops," which was filmed, as so many other SyFy
Channel fodder are, in Bulgaria.

Despite Eric Roberts' voracious scenery-chewing of bargain-basement scenery (pictured below), Tiberius was, historically, not so much evil as he was bored. He was described as a dark, reclusive, somber man who never really wanted to be emperor. Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder called him "the gloomiest of men." As a matter of fact, he eventually stepped down and lived to the ripe old age of 77, more than twice the life expectancy of the period.

Eric Roberts, the older brother of Julia Roberts (the two were estranged until a 2004 reconciliation), was once nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, for his role in 1985's "Runaway Train," with Jon Voight and Rebecca De Mornay. He had legitimate roles in "The Dark Knight" and "The Expendables" while becoming a familiar face in countless, cheesy direct-to-video fodder, including his hammy performance as a mad scientist in the SyFy Channel's"Sharktopus," which, like "Cyclops," was produced by Roger Corman and his wife, Julie.

Leave it to The Three Stooges (the trio with Joe DeRita) to encounter conjoined cyclopes when they travel back in time to mythical Greece in 1959's "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules" (pictured below). The monster was played by twin brothers Merlin McKeever and Mike McKeever. Merlin enjoyed a 13-year career in the NFL, while Mike's football future was cut short by a head injury in his senior year at USC.

The Stooges overpower the Cyclopes with the help of Curly Joe's
sleeping pills in "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules."

In 1958, Ray Harryhausen, the unrivaled maestro of stop-motion animation, added a cyclops to his version of tales from the Arabian Nights, "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad." Inspired by the feral Greek god Pan, Harryhausen gave his cyclops a horn, hairy goat legs, and cloven hooves (pictured below).

Fifteen years later, in the long-awaited sequel to "The 7th Voyage," 1973's "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad," starring John Phillip Law (best known for his role as the blind angel Pygar in the 1968 sci-fi fantasy "Barbarella," with Jane Fonda), Harryhausen crafted a monstrous, cyclopean centaur (pictured below).

Sinbad defeats the evil centaur while buxom slave girl Margiana
(Caroline Munro) marvels in the background in "The Golden
Voyage of Sinbad." Harryhausen used a small doll's eye for the
creature's forehead and - sorry, PETA - ocelot fur for its legs.

Bernard Bresslaw, a 6' 7" character actor who was a regular in the British "Carry On" comedies through the 1960s and '70s, portrayed a towering but sympathetic cyclops in the 1983 "Star Wars" rip-off "Krull" (pictured below), which gave Liam Neeson an early role as an ill-fated thief.

Emerging from the mists of ancient myths and legends, we find ourselves in the Atomic Age, when unchecked radiation created gigantic, mutant insects, animals, and humans, not to mention awakening a long-dormant albeit fictitious dinosaur called Godzilla (or Gojira, if you're picky). Writer-producer-director Bert I. Gordon established himself as the grade Z-movie auteur of giant human and monster pictures, including "The Amazing Colossal Man," "War of the Colossal Beast," "Village of the Giants," and "Empire of the Ants." Gordon's 1957 opus, "The Cyclops" (pictured below) presented a mutated, 25-foot human monstrosity, yet one more cinematic victim of exposure to radioactivity. The supporting cast included B-movie stalwart Lon Chaney Jr.

The title role in  "The Cyclops" is played by Duncan Parkin, a
camera grip-turned-stuntman who appeared in only one other
movie, playing the title character in Bert I. Gordon's "War of the
Colossal Beast," another one-eyed casualty of an atomic mishap. 

Traveling into the future, we encounter Leela, the captain and pilot for a 31st-century intergalactic delivery service on "Futurama." Voiced during its seven-season run by Katey Sagal (best known as Peg Bundy on 11 seasons of "Married...with Children" and as Gemma on seven seasons of "Sons of Anarchy"), Leela (pictured below) was depicted as having grown up a bullied orphan who always believed she was an alien, until learning that she is actually the cyclopean daughter of sewer mutants.

Speaking of animated cyclopes, we would be remiss for not mentioning Mike Wazowski, the diminutive, green-skinned station runner and coach at the Monsters, Inc. factory in the 2001film of the same name. Voiced by Billy Crystal, Mike returned in the 2013 prequel, "Monsters University," and popped up in "Cars." The character (pictured below, with Boo, in "Monsters, Inc.") appeared in wordless cameos in "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E."

Chapter II: Short-Sighted Scalawags, Seafarers and a Senora

It's time to orient ourselves to the real world, where we find the cinema's favorite, and most influential, single-eyed character - the eyepatch-wearing pirate. Remember the image of the pirate in those old "Draw Me!" ads for Art Instruction Schools that appeared in comic books and magazines?

Among the instructors at the Art Instruction Schools, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were Mort Walker, creator of "Beetle Bailey," and "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz, who had attended the school in his teens during the Depression.

With a great degree of trepidation (to be explained subsequently), we ask, "Why would pirates wear eyepatches?" Was it to cover the loss of an eye in a sea battle or ship raid? Jim Sheedy, a doctor of vision science and director of the Vision Performance Institute as Oregon's Pacific University, posited an alternative explanation. In 2013, he told the Wall Street Journal that the "smart" pirates "wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside." When the buccaneer went below decks, he moved the patch to his outdoor eye to easily see in the darkness.

According to Sheedy, the eyes can take up to 25 minutes to adapt from dazzling daylight to near darkness, a process that requires the regeneration of photo pigments. By his fanciful theory, a swashbuckler would simply switch the eyepatch and immediately be ready to buckle his swash in the lower decks without stumbling over barrels of rum or running into walls.

In fact, military survival guidelines for nighttime maneuvers recommend soldiers keep one eye closed or covered when encountering bright lights to preserve night vision in the protected eye. The same goes for military pilots.

In a special pirate-themed episode in 2007, Discovery Channel's "MythBusters" tested the eyepatch hypothesis and determined that it was indeed plausible. However - and this is the cause for the aforementioned trepidation - there are no first-hand accounts of pirates wearing eyepatches. In the 2016 book The Golden Age of Piracy: The Truth Behind Pirate Myths, author Berenson Little, who insisted there is "zero evidence" for the vision theory, noted, "In reality, the eyepatch was never specifically associated with pirates except in fiction and films."

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of a pirate called Long John Silver and buried booty, Treasure Island, was originally serialized in a children's magazine from 1881 to 1882 and published as a book in 1883. Stevenson's fiction introduced a number of tropes associated with pirates - the peg leg, the cocked tricorn hat, the parrot perched upon a shoulder, the buried treasure - but not a single mention of an eyepatch. Nor can an eyepatch be found in any screen adaptation of the novel.

N.C. Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island in 1911
included this depiction of Long John Silver and Jim.

The same year that N.C. Wyeth illustrated an edition of Treasure Island (pictured above), British artist Francis Donkin Bedford illustrated the first publication of Peter Pan (originally titled Peter and Wendy) by J.M. Barrie, who introduced readers to the image of a pirate with a hook in place of a hand (pictured below).

...But no eyepatch...

America's two premier illustrators of fictional and historical pirate adventures, Howard Pyle (1853 - 1911) and N.C. Wyeth (1882 - 1945), were credited with creating what has become the modern stereotype of the appearance and dress of pirates. Wyeth, the patriarch of an illustrious family of artists (his son, Andrew Wyeth, did the famous painting "Christina's World"), studied under Pyle's tutelage shortly after the turn of the century. Again, one would be hard pressed to find a single eyepatch in their illustrations.

This illustration of Captain William Kidd,
burying his loot on Gardiners Island on the
east end of what is now New York's Long
Island, was reprinted in Howard Pyle's Book
of Pirates, published posthumously in 1921.

N.C. Wyeth illustrated Treasure Island in 1911,
the year that his mentor, Howard Pyle, died.

Come to think of it, for years, over the years, one would be equally hard pressed to spot espy a freebooter wearing an eyepatch among the audio-animatronic figures in either "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction at California's Disneyland or Florida's Magic Kingdom.

Life magazine devoted a four-page photo-story to the
1967 opening of "Pirates of the Caribbean" in Anaheim's
Disneyland. The attraction made its debut in Disney
World's Magic Kingdom six years later.

Since 2006, the attractions at the Disney parks have added characters from the phenomenally popular series of "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies starring Johnny Depp. In the first three films of the franchise, American character Lee Arenberg and British comedian Mackenzie Crook provided comic relief as deceptively witless pirates, Pintell and Ragetti, the latter of whom is constantly losing his wooden eye, occasionally having to wear a patch to cover his empty socket.

As played by Mackenzie Crook, Ragetti professes his wish for a
real glass eye. Fans of Pintell and Ragetti were disappointed
when the comic duo came up missing in "Pirates of the Caribbean:
On Stranger Tides." Nor will they be returning in "Pirates of
the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales."

At least Raggetti had an eye socket. In the rambunctious comedic adventure "The Goonies" (1985), directed by Richard Donner (best known for making the first "Superman" film with Christopher Reeve, as well as the series of "Lethal Weapon" pictures, starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover), a bunch of misfit kids - including Sean Astin, (a then 17-year old) Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, and Martha Plimpton - search for the buried treasure of a legendary 17th-century pirate named One-Eyed Willie, who was, so the story goes, born without an eye socket but wore a patch nonetheless (pictured below).

In 1972, Hammer Film Productions cast Christopher Lee (who typically donned Dracula's black-and-red cape in several movies for the studio) as sadistic Captain LaRoche in the low-budget potboiler "The Pirates of Blood River" (pictured below).

Oliver Reed (as crewmate Brocaire) listens to Christopher Lee
lead a privateer pep rally in "The Pirates of Blood River."

Incidentally, a year after navigating Blood River, Christopher Lee found himself in an eyepatch again for his role as Cardinal Richilieu's sinister henchman, Comte de Rochefort, in director Richard Lester's high-spirited revitalization of "Three Musketeers" (1973) and its filmed-back-to-back sequel "The Four Musketeers."

Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) and the Comte de Rochefort
(Christopher Lee) plot against d'Artagnan (Michael York) and
his swashbuckling friends (Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain,
and Frank Finlay) in "The Three Musketeers."

Although the author of the original The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, described de Rochefort as "fair with a scar across his cheek," with no mention of an eyepatch, actors cast as the conspiring count in subsequent screen adaptations were inspired by Christopher Lee's addition of the ocular accessory, including...

Michael Wincott in the 1993 Disney-meets-"Young Guns"
version, featuring Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland...

and Mads Mikkelson in 2011's 3-D "The Three Musketeers,"
directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the auteur behind the
"Resident Evil" movies.

OK, so Tim Roth wasn't cast as de Rochefort in 2001's "The
Musketeers" a bizarre jumble of traditional Hollywood swash-
buckling and Hong Kong martial arts, instead portraying the
Man in Black, a bad guy made up just for the film.

But we digress. Getting back on board under the Jolly Roger, we encounter Patchy the Pirate, a rare live-action character from the wildly successful Nickelodeon animated series "SpongeBob SquarePants." Played by comedian Tom Kenny (pictured below), otherwise busy as the off-camera voice of SpongeBob and, among several other characters, Gary the sea snail, Patchy, who resides in an unnamed suburb of Encino, California, is the president of the SpongeBob SquarePants Fan Club and the host of "SpongeBob" specials.

The image of an eyepatch-wearing pirate might have been inspired by a noteworthy non-pirate. At the 1794 Siege of Calvi in Corsica during the French Revolutionary Wars, British Naval commander Horatio Nelson suffered a serious facial wound that cost him the use of his right eye. Three years later, his right arm was partially amputated after an encounter with a cannonball in an assault on a Spanish port city in the Canary Islands. Legend has it that a half hour after the battlefront surgery, Nelson was back on his feet, issuing orders to his crew.

Nelson's heroics turned him into a living legend, and to draw attention to Nelson's wartime exploits, artists often depicted him with an eyepatch (something he probably never really wore), as pictured above in the porcelain figurine.  Over time, the public may have associated eyepatches with swashbuckling adventures at sea.

Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (best known, of course, as the
vexingly fickle Scarlett O'Hara in the screen classic "Gone with the
Wind") were real-life newlyweds when they starred in "That
Hamilton Woman," prompting the movie's publicity machine to
promote them as "The Year's Most Exciting Team of Screen Lovers!"

Lord Nelson's reluctance to be seen wearing an eyepatch didn't stop filmmakers from capitalizing on the dramatic effect it produced when worn onscreen by heavyweight British thespians Laurence Olivier in 1941's "That Hamilton Woman" (pictured above) and Peter Finch in 1973's "The Hamilton Affair" (pictured below). Both films dramatized the illicit romance between the naval hero and his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, a former dance-hall performer and prostitute.

It's all in the scowl...Peter Finch displays the proper
veddy British demeanor as Lord Nelson in "The
Hamilton Affair." His mistress, Lady Hamilton, was
played by Glenda Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner,
for "Women in Love" and "A Touch of Class."

On the distaff side of history, Ana de Mendoza, a 16th-century Spanish noblewoman was famously depicted in several portraits wearing a patch over her right eye (pictured below, left). The most supported theory about how she lost the eye was that it was damaged by the tip of a rapier recklessly wielded by a pageboy. Julia Ormond (the star of "Legends of the Fall," "First Knight," and "Sabrina") portrayed de Mendoza in a 2008 Spanish-produced historical drama titled "The Escorial Conspiracy" (pictured below, right), costarring Jason Isaacs (best known as the sadistic British colonel who kills two of Mel Gibson's sons in "The Patriot").

In the 19th century, George Cruikshank, a British caricaturist best known for illustrating a number of books by his contemporary, Charles Dickens, provided illustrations for an anthology whimsically titled The Universal Songster; or Museum of Mirth: forming the Most Complete, Extensive and Valuable Collection of Ancient and Modern Songs in the English Language, which included "The Old Commodore," a ditty about an aging seaman afflicted with gout who doesn't want to die on land. Note, as depicted below, that Cruikshank gave the "tough old commodore" an eyepatch.

More than likely, in our modest opinion, the stereotypical image of a buccaneer in an eyepatch may have been inspired by a series of magazine ads for a line of men's clothing featuring the "Hathaway Man" (pictured below) . C.F. Hathaway Company was a private manufacturer of men's shirts, founded in 1837. The company, which made uniform shirts for Union soldiers during the Civil War, became famous for its "man-with-the-eyepatch" ad campaign starting in the 1950s.

The original model for the Hathaway ads was allegedly
a real-life Russian aristocrat, Baron George Wrangell,
who could see perfectly with both eyes. But he did have
trouble keeping his hands steady during photo shoots
because of his heavy drinking.

Chapter III: One-Eyed Jacks...and Jills

Regardless of the origin of filmdom's stylish facial accessory, the template was forged for cinema's suavest, most fashion-conscious bad guys and antiheroes. Where better to start this chapter of screen history than the 007 movies?

In Thunderball, the ninth published James Bond novel, Emilio Largo, the number two man in the international crime syndicate called SPECTRE (second only to Ernst Stavro Blofeld), was described by author Ian Fleming as an imposing, muscular, olive-skinned Italian with long sideburns and hairy hands. As portrayed by Sicilian-born actor Aldofo Celi In the 1965 film "Thunderball" (the fourth 007 movie starring Sean Connery), Sicilian-born Adolfo Celi cut a more refined figure as Largo, complete with a stylish eyepatch not mentioned by Fleming.

Bond and Largo match wits over a table of 007's favorite card
game of baccarat, under the watchful gaze of Largo's mistress,
Domino (Claudine Auger), in "Thunderball."

Like German actor Gert Frobe, the titular villain in "Goldfinger," Adolfo Celi suffered the indignity of having his lines dubbed by a voice actor. Likewise, Paris-born Auger's heavily accented dialogue was re-recorded by voice artist Nikki van der Zyl, who, coincidentally, also re-dubbed Swedish-born Ursula Andress' voice in "Dr. No," as well as gilt-lacquered Shirley Eaton's in "Goldfinger."

In 1957, B-movie action star (and noted furniture craftsman) George Montgomery starred as a New Mexico town marshal who lost an eye during the Civil War in the low-budget horse opera "Black Patch." The New York Times offered, "There have been far worse little westerns."

In a ludicrously posed publicity shot for "Black Patch,"
George Montgomery takes a punch from tough-guy costar
Leo V. Gordon, who also wrote the terse script. 

"Spartacus" found Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis playing characters who grow as close to brothers as two unrelated men can: one a fugitive gladiator leading a rebellion against the Roman Empire, the other a household slave escaping the unsavory advances of a power-hungry senator (Laurence Olivier). In 1958's "The Vikings," the two Hollywood icons portrayed half-brothers who would rather see the other dead, especially after the hunting hawk belonging to Tony (again cast as a slave) attacks Kirk's face and gouges out an eye.

Now you don't see it, now you do...Throughout most of the action in
"The Vikings," Kirk Douglas opts for the carefree, patch-less look.

Speaking of Vikings, they, for the most part, worshipped the pantheon of gods known as the Aesir, including Odin and Thor. As the chief Norse deity, Odin ceaselessly searched for wisdom, which brought him to a mythical well among the roots of the world tree Yggdrasil, tended by Mimir, the guardian of all knowledge. Before being allowed to drink from the well, Odin was asked to sacrifice one of his eyes, which he plucked out willingly.

An illuminated 11th-century manuscript offered
this depiction of the one-eyed Odin.

In the 2011 comic book movie "Thor" from the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, Anthony Hopkins played an appropriately single-orbed Odin (pictured below), a role he repeated in the 2013 sequel and will reprise in the third outing in 2017.

Anthony Hopkins poses with Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Tom
Hiddleston (Loki) on the set of "Thor," directed by Shakespeare
wunderkind Kenneth Branagh. "I just play Odin like a human
being, with maybe a little more dimension" Hopkins said. "I grow
a beard, look hopefully impressive and keep it as real as possible."

From 1935 to 1953, Hollywood legend Bette Davis received ten Oscar nominations as Best Actress, winning two, for "Dangerous" in 1935 and "Jezebel" in 1939, but by the end of the 1950s, her career had stalled. In September 1962, the 54-year-old actress placed an ad Variety which stated, "Situations wanted - women artists," proclaiming, "Thirty years experience as an actress in Motion Pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood."

The ad worked, as her career saw new life throughout the 1960s, albeit in a series of outre performances in often macabre thrillers. In "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" she played an aging former child star who torments her paraplegic sister (Joan Crawford); in "Dead Ringer," she essayed a dual role as estranged twins, one of whom murders the other to assume her identity; in "The Nanny," she was cast as a Mary Poppins-from-hell; and in the title role in "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," she portrayed an eccentric recluse suspected of decapitating her lover (Bruce Dern) decades earlier.

In 1968's "The Anniversary," written and directed by veteran filmmakers from Hammer Film Productions, a studio noted for its bloody revival of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Mummy pictures in the 1950s and '60s, featured Bette Davis as a cruel, manipulative matriarch of a dysfunctional family (pictured below). The New York Times called it "a horror film for faint-hearted horror movie fans."

In "The Anniversary," the caustic matriarch (Bette Davis) leaves
her glass eye under a pillow to scare her youngest son's fiancee.
Davis had to wear a series of self-adhesive eyepatches, which
proved to be a constant irritant and affected her equilibrium.

John Wayne was in the midst of filming the 1970 western "Rio Lobo" when he took a break to attend the 42nd annual Academy Awards, where he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the trigger-happy, "one-eyed fat man" in "True Grit." When the Duke returned to the set of "Rio Lobo," he was welcomed by cast and crew all donning Rooster Cogburn eyepatches. For the 2010 revisionist reboot of "True Grit" written and directed by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, Jeff Bridges made the role of Marshal Rooster Cogburn his own by moving the patch to the other eye.

(Middle) Between John Wayne and Jeff Bridges, Warren Oates
had the unenviable task of essaying the role of Rooster Cogburn
in the 1978 TV movie "True Grit: A Further Adventure."

Another figure in an eyepatch on horseback - albeit set in Europe during World War II rather than the American Old West - was depicted by Burt Lancaster (pictured below), as the enigmatic Major Falconer, in 1969's "Castle Keep," a comically surreal and Gothic twist on the war movie genre directed by relative newcomer Sydney Pollack, a filmmaker who would become well known for his several collaborations with Robert Redford. among them "The Way We Were" and "Out of Africa."

On the Axis side of the European Theater in the war, Robert Duvall portrayed a fictional one-eyed German colonel (pictured below) who plots to kidnap British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and spirit him into Germany in 1976's "The Eagle Has Landed," a rousing, slam-bang adventure costarring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasence (as Himmler), Anthony Quayle, Treat Williams, and Larry Hagman. It was the last movie directed by John Sturges, a no-nonsense filmmaker best known for such classic guy movies as ""Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," "The Magnificent Seven," and "The Great Escape."

There was a real-life one-eyed German colonel, who spearheaded a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler near the end of World War II. Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was also a count (Hitler hated the German nobility) who was wounded severely during the 1942 Tunisia Campaign in North Africa, losing his left eye, his right hand, and two fingers on his left hand. He jokingly told friends he never knew what to do with so many fingers when he had them.

Claus von Stauffenberg before the wounds.

Stauffenberg was convinced that German military virtues had been made obsolete by Hitler's criminal aggressions and was outraged by the unchecked genocide of Jews, as well as mass executions of ethnic Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs, and gypsies. On July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg left a briefcase containing a small bomb in a room where Hitler would be holding his daily conference. The explosion fatally wounded four others, but Hitler survived, remarkably shielded from the blast by the heavy, solid oak legs of the conference table.

After a shootout with German troops that left him wounded in his shoulder, Stauffenberg was captured and later executed by a firing squad. He initially received a burial with military honors, but within a day, the SS exhumed his body, stripped his uniform of medals, and cremated his remains. Stauffenberg's widow and five children successfully fled the country; his wife died in 2006 at age 92. Not so lucky was the count's older brother, who, along with seven other conspirators, was executed by slow strangulation with piano wire. Over 20,000 Germans were eventually killed or dispatched to concentration camps in the ensuing purge. As for Adolf, just over nine months following the assassination attempt, the pathetic little art school reject shot himself in the head in a bomb shelter under a ruined garden near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Actor Wolfgang Preiss (who played a German general in the epic World War II movie "The Longest Day") garnered a German Federal Film Award for his role as Claus von Stauffenberg in the 1955 German picture "The Plot to Assassinate Hitler" (pictured below).

Wolfgang Preiss may have won an award for
his 1955 portrayal of Claus von Stauffenberg,
but he had the patch on the wrong eye.

Brad Davis, best known for his breakout role as Billy Hayes in 1978's "Midnight Express" (loosely based on the true story of an American college student imprisoned in Turkey for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country), portrayed Claus von Stauffenberg in a 1988 made-for-television movie titled "The Plot to Kill Hitler" (pictured below).

When Tom Cruise was cast as Stauffenberg in 2008's "Valkyrie" ("Operation Valkyrie" became the name of the plot to oust Nazi leadership), German politicians were reluctant to allow the filmmakers to utilize historical locations due to the actor's belief in Scientology, which is regarded suspiciously in the country. Cruise (pictured below), at first, found the character's eyepatch difficult to work with, but the diminutive thespian toughed it out, acknowledging that the real Stauffenberg had to live with the discomfort.

For the role of antihero Snake Plissken in filmmaker John Carpenter's dystopian fantasy "Escape from New York" (1981), Kurt Russell (pictured below) himself suggested the signature eyepatch. The character, a hero of the so-called "Leningrad Campaign," was described by the A.V. Club's Keith Phipps as "a cross between Clint Eastwood and a damaged Vietnam vet." Russell, who was eager to shed his lightweight screen image from a number of Disney comedies (like "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes"), could still fit into the original costume 15 years later when he reprised Snake in the long overdue 1996 sequel, "Escape from L.A."

For a low-budget director, Mark L. Lester has consistently displayed a flair for action and a talent for blowing things up, in a diverse filmography that includes "Truck Stop Women" (starring 1970 Playmate of the Year Claudia Jennings), "Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw" (featuring the screen debut of TV's "Wonder Woman," Lynda Carter), "Roller Boogie" (OK, nothing blows up here, but there is the sight of star Linda Blair trying to bust out of her roller rink outfit)...

..."Class of 1984" (a cult thriller that gave Michael J. Fox an early film role), "Commando" (an over-the-top Schwarzenegger action flick with Arnold alone responsible for a body count of 81), and "Armed and Dangerous" (an action comedy misfire with John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Meg Ryan).

In 1984, Mark L. Lester joined the long list of moviemakers to adapt Stephen King's tales to the screen with "Firestarter," starring Drew Barrymore as a "pyrokinetic" whiz kid who can spark blazes with her mind. (King coined the term "pyrokinesis" in his 1980 novel.) Portraying sinister government agents are Martin Sheen and George C. Scott, the latter particularly creepy as assassin John Rainbird, a ponytailed Native American who was badly scarred in the Vietnam War (pictured below). His befriending of the nine-year-old Barrymore's character, whom he intends to kill to assimilate her power, borders uncomfortably on pedophilia (Roger Ebert's review bluntly referred to his role as a "child molester").

Rainbird somehow survived the climactic conflagration in the original film to return as a menace in a 2002 made-for-television sequel "Firestarter 2: Rekindled," a two-part "miniseries" that premiered on the SyFy Channel. Malcolm McDowell played the even more badly scarred hitman, John Rainbird, sans the eye covering, in a cast that included Dennis Hopper (pictured below).

In the torrent of films based on Stephen King's fiction, 1985's "Silver Bullet" sticks out as a modest entry with a quirky cast including Gary Busey, Corey Haim, Terry O'Quinn (best known for his performance as John Locke on the cult TV series "Lost"), James Gammon (beloved as gravely-voiced Cleveland Indians manager Lou Brown in the "Major League" films), and 1940s movie tough guy Lawrence Tierney. Based on a novella King published in 1983 titled Cycle of the Werewolf, with original illustrations by venerable comic book artist Bernie Wrightson, the movie featured Everett McGill as a Baptist minister who turns out to be the lupine beast terrorizing a small rural town in Maine. After the creature is struck in the left eye by a well-aimed fireworks rocket, the reverend starts wearing a giveaway eyepatch (pictured below).

Coincidentally, Everett McGill played the husband of a woman in an eyepatch on TV's "Twin Peaks." Five years after "Silver Bullet," Everett McGill, who had played Stilgar in director David Lynch's 1984 version of "Dune," was cast in the Mark Frost-David Lynch series as gas station owner Big Ed Hurley, suffering a dysfunctional marriage to Nadine Hurley (played by Wendy Robie), an extraordinarily strong woman obsessed with creating silent drape-runners who lost an eye in a hunting accident on her honeymoon (pictured below). In 1991, McGill and Robie were reunited as creepy "Daddy" and "Mommy" in Wes Craven's "The People Under the Stairs."

Thirty years after gouging out his eyes as the Greek king who found out he killed his father and married his mother in "Oedipus the King," Christopher Plummer donned an eyepatch for his role as treacherous Klingon General Chang in 1991's "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." Plummer asked that his alien makeup be subtle to give the character a more human appearance. For whatever reason, Chang's eyepatch was mentioned as being bolted to his head.

Fond of quoting Shakespeare throughout
"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,"
Chang's last words are, "To be, or not to be."

Wes Studi, a noted Native American actor and activist best known for roles in "Dances with Wolves," "The Last of the Mohicans," and "Geronimo: An American Legend," sported an eyepatch for his part as black-market arms dealer Viktor Sagat in 1994's "Street Fighter," an action picture inspired by the popular video arcade game, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Cast as supervillain General Bison, Raul Julia (pictured below, with Wes Studi) was battling stomach cancer (evidenced by his gaunt, pale visage) but took the role at his children's request; sadly, he died two months before the movie's release.

As related in Rob Lowe's memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the young actor was leaving a charity dinner in the mid-1980s when he said good night to a table that included Cary Grant, Robert Wagner, and Prince Rainier of Monaco. As he walked away, Lowe overheard Wagner mutter, "Ya know, guys, I think that kid's banged each one of our daughters." Truth be told, in the '80s, Lowe dated Jennifer Grant (Cary's only child, from his three-year marriage to actress Dyan Cannon), Kate Wagner (daughter of Robert and his second wife, actress Marion Marshall), and Princess Stephanie of Monaco. Upon meeting Cary Grant for the first time, Rob Lowe received a piece of advice he would never forget. The elder actor intoned, "Young man, don't ever eat a hot dog on a dais...Because then there'll be a picture of you with a hot dog in your mouth!"

When moviemakers were looking for an actor to play a younger version of Dr. Evil's second-in-command, No. 2 (the character portrayed by Robert Wagner in the first "Austin Powers" movie), they looked no further than Rob Lowe, who appeared as No. 2 in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" (1999) and "Austin Powers in Goldmember" (2002).

To prepare for his role, Lowe watched several reruns of Wagner's '80s series "Hart to Hart." In an interview with Larry King, Wagner beamed, "That's my boy, Rob Lowe!"

Daryl Hannah, an actress known for such reserved roles as a naive beauty school graduate in "Steel Magnolias" and as, literally, a fish-out-of-water in "Splash," was cast against type as Elle Driver, code-named California Mountain Snake, the cruelest member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Quentin Tarantino's epic revenge saga, "Kill Bill Vol. 1" and "Kill Bill Vol. 2." As an insolent student of Pai Mei, a venerable teacher of the Bak Mei and Eagle's Claw styles of kung fu, Elle had her right eye plucked out by the insulted master.

In a climactic duel, the vengeful Bride (Uma Thurman) yanks
out Elle Driver's good eye, squishes it with her bare foot, and
leaves the totally blind killer flailing about alone in a trailer
with a loose black mamba snake.

"Two Thousand Maniacs!" (1964), a gory, darkly humorous flick made by splatter pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis, was about a small southern town where the spirits of massacred Confederates materialize to wreak bloody revenge on Northern tourists. Four decades later, the movie was remade as a ludicrously grisly black comedy titled "2001 Maniacs"(2005), co-produced by Eli Roth (a filmmaker best known as the director of the first two "Hostel" torture-porns, and as the actor who played the baseball bat-swinging "Bear Jew" in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"). Robert Englund (best known as Freddy Krueger in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films) starred as the seemingly congenial mayor of Pleasant Valley, Georgia, whose eyepatch is decorated with the Confederate Stars and Bars (pictured below).

A California Institute of the Arts student, Kelly Conran had grown up fascinated by the unchecked imagination and fantastical whimsy of old-time pictures like "Metropolis," "King Kong" and "Lost Horizon" and of such vintage serials as "Flash Gordon." He became single-mindedly obsessed with creating his own adventure magnum opus in the same spirit of his childhood memories. Conran, with the help of his brother and friends, labored for years on an outdated Macintosh personal computer to craft a six-minute "teaser" that was enough to interest Jon Avnet, the director of "Fried Green Tomatoes" and executive producer of "Black Swan," to not only come on board as a producer of what would become "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004) but also to present the idea to stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was the first major motion picture shot completely against a blue screen, with computer-generated sets, location backgrounds, and special effects added in post-production. Also added was footage of a young Laurence Olivier (who had been deceased 15 years before the movie's release), which was manipulated for his "role" as the story's mad scientist and supervillain. Conran's revolutionary approach would influence the filmmakers of "Sin City" and "300."

Before and after: Kelly Conran directs Jude Law and Gwyneth
Paltrow on the bare-bones blue-screen set (top) prior to the
magic of post-production computerized enhancement. 

Roger Ebert gushed, "'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow' is even more fun than it sounds like. In its heedless energy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It's like a film that escapes from the imaginations directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way." In a cast that included Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, British-Iranian standup comedian Omid Djalii, and Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, Angelina Jolie had a supporting role as Francesca "Franky" Cook, the stylishly uniformed (right down to a dashing eyepatch) commander of a Royal Navy flying aircraft carrier (pictured below).

Brendan Gleeson is a Dublin-born actor whose remarkably diverse career - from "Braveheart" to "Lake Placid," "Mission: Impossible II," "28 Days Later," "Cold Mountain," "Troy," "Beowulf," "In Bruges,""The Guard," and "Calvary," not to mention an Emmy Award-winning interpretation of Winston Churchill in the 2009 HBO production "Into the Storm" - has made him one of the most underrated treasures in the Moviehouse.

In the fourth, fifth, and seventh films in the "Harry Potter" franchise, Gleeson loomed large as Professor Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody (pictured below), famed for capturing several criminal wizards while losing various body parts in the process, including part of his left leg, a slice of his nose, and his left eye.

Brendan Gleeson's then-27-year-old son, Domhnail Gleeson
(who portrayed Moon in the Coen brothers' revisionist remake
of "True Grit"), appeared as Hogwarts Head Boy and professional
Curse-Breaker William Weasley (right) in the two-part "Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows" screen saga.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the character Nick Fury is a former U.S. Army officer and CIA operative who became the leader of the international intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division). A hand grenade blast during World War II damaged Fury's left eye, which, over time, lost nearly all capacity for sight. Samuel L. Jackson (pictured below) first appeared as Nick Fury in an uncredited cameo after the end credits to 2008's "Iron Man," starring Robert Downey Jr. Jackson signed a nine-picture contract to portray Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seven of which have been filmed. Jackson's Fury appeared, as well, in episodes of the TV series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

Back in 1998, David Hasselhoff (pictured below) starred in the title role of the TV movie "Nick Fury: Agent of Shield" (forgoing the acronym), a TV movie that benefitted from a comic-savvy teleplay by David S. Goyer, who has worked on the screenplays for the "Blade" trilogy, the "Dark Knight" trilogy, "Ghost Rider" and its sequel, "Man of Steel," and "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice."

In 1994's "True Lies," the appearance and mannerisms of Spencer Trilby, the commander of the covert counter-terrorism task force called Omega Sector for which Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker works, were inspired by the character Nick Fury as originally depicted in Marvel Comics. For the brief role of Trilby, director James Cameron wanted an actor who could "plausibly intimidate" Schwarzenegger. Enter Charlton Heston, who, in the twilight of his career, strapped on the eyepatch and impressively intimidated Arnold.

When he appeared in his cameo role for "True Lies," Charlton Heston was at a point in his career where he performed, more or less, walk-ons, in such films as "Wayne's World 2," "Tombstone," John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness," Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet," Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday," Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes," even a cheesy Jean-Claude Van Damme action flick, "The Order"...just so filmmakers like Cameron, Carpenter, Branagh, Stone, Burton, and even Van Damme could say, "Hey, I worked with the great Charlton Heston!"

Before being terrorized by sadistic dictator Negan and his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat dubbed "Lucille" on "The Walking Dead," former Sheriff's Deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) had to contend with - from 2012 to 2015 - The Governor, the sociopathic leader of an antagonistic militia who besieges Rick's community of survivors occupying a prison in Georgia. The Governor's right eye was poked out by a glass shard wielded by Michonne (Danai Gurira), whose usual weapon of choice is the Japanese sword called a katana.

Like costar Andrew Lincoln, David Morrissey, who portrayed
The Governor, is a British import; Lincoln was born in London,
Morrissey in Liverpool. (Actor Tom Payne, who plays "Jesus"
in "The Walking Dead," was born in Chelmsford, Essex.)

During the sixth season episode of "The Walking Dead" titled "No Way Out," Rick Grimes' son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), had his right eye shot out by a rotten kid who ends up skewered by Michonne's katana. This inspired his pop to singlehandedly lead a spectacular hack-a-thon against invading walkers.

The gruesome makeup for Carl's eye wound took nine hours to apply.

"Machete" (2010), a cartoonishly violent action picture written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin, Alvaro Rodriguez, and directed by Robert Rodriguez and his frequent editor, Ethan Maniquis, provided veteran screen thug Danny Trejo with his first leading role, in an eclectic cast featuring Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, and Tom Savini. Michelle Rodriguez (best known as Letty Ortiz in the "Fast & Furious" films and as Rain Ocampo in the "Resident Evil" movies) played Luz, part-time taco truck lady, full-time illegal alien aid leader, who is shot in the eye by bad guy Von Jackson (which sounds a lot like the name of the actor who portrayed him, Don Johnson). Given up for dead, she resurrects herself as a half-naked, fully armed avenger (pictured below).

Michelle Rodriguez (pictured above, with Danny Trejo), reprised her role as Luz in the disappointing 2013 sequel, "Machete Kills," appearing alongside other returning cast members Jessica Alba and Tom Savini, as well as newcomers Mel Gibson, Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Charlie Sheen, who was credited by his birth name, Carlos Estevez.

Speaking of Lady Gaga, the iconoclastic, multi-Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter typified a trend among pop music divas by inexplicably voguing in fashionable designer eyepatches (pictured below).

...Rihanna, winner of eight Grammy Awards and 12 Billboard Music Awards, performed at the 2008 American Music Awards in an elegant eyepatch...

Barbados-born Rihanna reprised the look for a 2009 music video, then donned a chic, "see-through" eyepatch in the artwork for the release of the 2009 single "Russian Roulette" from her fourth studio album...

Far be it for the godmother of voguing to be be left out in the cold without an eyepatch...

Chapter IV: One Eye on the Action

Probably one of the most recognizable real-life figures who wore a trademark eyepatch was Moshe Dayan (pictured below), the Israeli minister of defense who became the hero of 1967's Six-Day War against the United Arab Republic. In the summer of 1941, early in World War II, English forces invaded Syria and Lebanon, which were occupied by the Nazi-puppet government of Vichy France. As a member of the British-organized Jewish Auxiliary Police, Dayan led a unit that captured a Vichy police station in southern Lebanon. He was scanning Vichy French positions from the building rooftop when a French sniper's bullet struck Dayan's binoculars, sending glass and metal fragments into his left eye. The extensive damage to his ocular muscles prevented Dayan's ability to use a glass eye.

Dayan grew to despise his signature patch, writing in his autobiography that he was "ready to make any effort and stand any suffering, if only I could get rid of my black eyepatch. The attention it drew was intolerable to me." In 2005, 24 years after Dayan's death from a massive heart attack, his eyepatch was offered for auction on eBay with a starting bid of $75,000.

But we digress. In the Moviehouse, we turn our attention to filmmakers with a singular - literally - vision. The prodigious career of legendary director Raoul Walsh spanned a half century, from the silent era to the 1960s and included such screen classics as "High Sierra" (starring Humphrey Bogart), "They Died with Their Boots On" (featuring Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer), "Desperate Journey" (teaming Flynn with Ronald Reagan), and "White Heat" (starring James Cagney). In his early years, Walsh also acted in silent pictures, including a role as assassin John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation."

It was Walsh who gave furniture-moving prop "boy" and bit player Marion Morrison his shot to Hollywood stardom in the 1930 western "The Big Trail" (pictured below). Walsh wanted to change the young man's screen name to Anthony Wayne, as he was enthralled at the time with a biography of American Revolutionary War hero General "Mad" Anthony Wayne, but when a studio executive thought "Anthony" sounded "too Italian," the director suggested "John." John Wayne was not present for this discussion.

In 1928, Walsh was driving on-location as the director of "In Old Arizona," a "Cisco Kid" western that ended up with five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, when a jackrabbit leapt through the windshield. In the ensuing crash, Walsh lost his right eye and wore a patch the remainder of his life (pictured below), which abruptly ended his acting sidelight.

 

Raoul Walsh may have "discovered" and dubbed John Wayne "John Wayne," but the movie star's enduring screen image was forged by a 25-year, 14-picture love-hate relationship under the unrelenting tutelage of director John Ford. Before directing the Duke in what the actor would regard as the best film he ever made, 1956's "The Searchers," John Ford entered a hospital for the routine removal of cataracts. Recuperating from surgery, Ford impatiently unrolled the bandages, inadvertently suffering the loss of sight in his left eye, forcing his use of a patch.

In a lighthearted New York magazine article titled "Great
Moments in Eye Patches," writer Logan Hill cited "The
Searchers" as John Ford's "best" film, excusing the director's
rash removal of his dressing as "a brilliant career move."

Director Nicholas Ray established an iconoclastic, larger-than-life presence in Hollywood, best known for the juvenile delinquent classic, "Rebel Without a Cause," starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, and for possibly the kinkiest western ever made, "Johnny Guitar," with Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine, Royal Dano, and John Carradine.

It's ballsy saloon marm Vienna (Joan Crawford) vs. butch vigilante
Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) in "Johnny Guitar."

Roger Ebert called "Johnny Guitar" "one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the western." French director Francois Truffaut loved the movie, describing it as the "Beauty and Beast of westerns, a dream western." As a matter of fact, Nicholas Ray was a major influence on filmmakers of the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard saying, "Cinema is Nicholas Ray."

In the late 1960s, Ray often donned a black patch over his right eye (pictured below). Its appearance was random, apparently without any medical causation, and he stopped wearing it altogether during his final years. Patrick McGilligan, the author of a 2011 biography of the director, speculated that Ray believed the patch communicated his credentials as "an adventurer, an outlaw, a buccaneer...who cut a romantic, bigger-than-life figure." Ray, according to McGilligan, brandished the eyepatch like "a crucifixion on his face."

As a venerated cartoonist and director during Hollywood's golden age of animation, Tex Avery created Daffy Duck for Warner Bros. and Droopy for MGM. He lost sight in his left eye while goofing around playing a game he jokingly recalled as "catch-the-paper clip." At Universal Studios, while working for Walter Lantz (the creator of Woody Woodpecker), Tex engaged in office horseplay that resulted in a rubber band-launched paper clip (some say it was a thumbtack) hitting his eye and immediately blinding it.

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Some believe that Avery's subsequent loss of depth perception gave his directing a unique, bizarre style, hallmarked by skewed perspectives and exaggerated expressions, illustrated above in Avery's 1945 MGM cartoon "Swing Shift Cinderella."

Animation director Tex Avery (center) poses on the doorsteps of
Termite Terrace, the fabled workplace for Warner Bros. animators,
including (left to right) Virgil Ross (an unsung co-creator of Bugs
Bunny), gagman Sid Sutherland, Chuck Jones, and Bob Clampett.

Chuck Jones, an animation icon in his own right, once said, "Animation is the art of timing...And the most brilliant masters of timing were usually comedians: Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Langdon - and Fred 'Tex' Avery."

Whenever veteran character Jack Elam and his distinguishing lazy left eye would pop up on a TV western, our dad would refer to him as "Cockeye." Elam's background was in finance, and he was employed variously as a bookkeeper, auditor, and accountant before his distinctive appearance - the result of a childhood mishap when he was accidentally poked in the eye with a pencil at a Boy Scout meeting - launched a surprising career as one of Hollywood's most unforgettable menaces (pictured below), a malevolent presence he would lampoon onscreen as advancing age turned his features into a human caricature.

Before he was inducted into the fabled Rad Pack, quintessentially tireless entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. knocked on heaven's door in a 1954 car accident on the storied Route 66, losing his left eye on impact with his Cadillac's bullet-shaped horn button. After wearing an eyepatch for six months, he was fitted for a glass eye.

Sammy's friends, actors Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler,
joke around with the entertainer. Following the accident,
Chandler volunteered to give one of his eyes if it
would keep Davis from total blindness. 

Finally, one of the most unique tales of a one-eyed filmmaker concerns Andre DeToth, an Austro-Huungarian playwright-movie director who emigrated to Hollywood in 1942. John Ford introduced DeToth to the western genre, and in 1951, DeToth shared an Oscar nomination for Best Story for "The Gunfighter," starring Gregory Peck and Karl Malden.

In 1953, Andre DeToth was chosen to direct the cult classic "House of Wax," featuring Vincent Price at his demented best as a disfigured sculptor who rebuilds his destroyed wax museum and repopulates it with wax-covered bodies of his murder victims. "House of Wax" was the first color 3-D motion picture released by a major studio. The curious thing is that DeToth lost sight in one eye at an early age and had no depth perception, so he couldn't appreciate the 3-D effects.

One of the more effective 3-D gimmicks in "House of Wax" is the
appearance of a pitchman for the new museum who bounces
paddle balls directly at the camera. Lurking in the background
is Charles Bronson, in an early role (credited by his real name
Charles Buchinsky) as Vinnie P.'s mute assistant, Igor.

 Vincent Price later recalled, "It's one of the great Hollywood stories. When they wanted a director for (a 3-D) film, they hired a man who couldn't see 3-D at all! Andre DeToth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He'd go to the rushes and say, 'Why is everybody so excited about this?' It didn't mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened - there weren't a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody."

In a gag publicity photo for "House of Wax," the mono-sighted
Andre DeToth poses in 3-D glasses with the film's stars, Vincent
Price and Phyllis Kirk.