The Eyes of Vonetta McGee

[Dusty Ayres]

Vonetta McGee (Blacula, Thomasine & Bushrod, Shaft In Africa)
died on July 10 of complications from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which she'd been battling since she was a teenager. For those of us not familiar with her work, this article from Movie Morlocks at TCM.com will fill in the details:

It’s her eyes I remember best. They were large and brown. Exotic, to me anyway. Haunting. Or haunted. Either way, they burned right through you but not in a witchy, malevolent way. They were kind, her eyes. Hopeful, even. On Saturday, July 10, 2010, Vonetta McGee’s eyes closed forever.


I first saw Vonetta McGee in BLACULA (1972), though that wasn’t her first film role. Correction: I’m sure I first saw her in pictures from BLACULA; I didn’t get to see the film itself for a few years. The classic “blaxploitation” pictures didn’t play at my local cinema and they didn’t run much on TV in the early 70s, so once those movies hit VHS I had a lot of catching up to do. But whether glimpsed in a black-and-white photo or up on the screen, Vonetta McGee had the kind of beauty that gets poems written and ships launched and empires built. You could have dropped her into any era and she would have fit in nicely… in a Medieval setting, in a jazz age drama, in a film noir, a pirate movie, a romance, a shoot-em-up… anywhere. Born in San Francisco and trained there in black box theater and church basement dramatics, she got a proper start in films in Italy. Her brother Andy remembers Italian citizens chasing the pair of them down the street for a closer look, a picture, a moment with someone who looked famous even before she really was. Luigi Magni cast her in the title role in his comedy FAUSTINA (1968), an interracial romantic comedy in which McGee’s local beauty is courted by a local slacker and a charming con man. The Magni film wasn’t widely seen outside of Italy and Sergio Corbucci used McGee’s relative obscurity to “introduce” her in his downbeat, snowbound western THE GREAT SILENCE (1968).

The production was a whiplash about-face from the frothy FAUSTINA, with McGee as a frontier widow who hires a mute gunman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) to kill the bounty hunter (Klaus Kinski) responsible for the death of her husband. There’s a bleak beauty to the film and a general air of defeatism and dread but few moviegoers could have been prepared for the almost apocalyptic cynicism of THE GREAT SILENCE‘s final frames.
Deglamorized (as much as she could have been), McGee was a credible western character… decent but desperate, desired by all men but isolated in agonizing loneliness, haunted but hungering. The actress’ few love scenes with Trintignant are comparatively chaste but underscore the film’s focus on the fragile, perishable goodness of people in the face of greed and fear. Actresses in spaghetti westerns can be so interchangeable, often because roles were given to them at the caprice of producers who were their husbands or boyfriends. I honestly don’t know how Vonetta McGee came to THE GREAT SILENCE but she does the film proud. (Alex Cox was suitably impressed by the film to give McGee a role in his 1984 indie hit REPO MAN.) Had she stayed on in Italy, I’d like to think that McGee could have done well in the cycle of psycho-thrillers were popular between 1969 and 1978. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sergio Martini got down on his knees and begged Vonetta McGee to stay on and star in some of his films, roles that eventually went to Edwige Fenech or Anita Strindberg. Whatever her reasons, though, McGee headed home and never looked back.


The production was a whiplash about-face from the frothy FAUSTINA, with McGee as a frontier widow who hires a mute gunman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) to kill the bounty hunter (Klaus Kinski) responsible for the death of her husband. There’s a bleak beauty to the film and a general air of defeatism and dread but few moviegoers could have been prepared for the almost apocalyptic cynicism of THE GREAT SILENCE‘s final frames.
Deglamorized (as much as she could have been), McGee was a credible western character… decent but desperate, desired by all men but isolated in agonizing loneliness, haunted but hungering. The actress’ few love scenes with Trintignant are comparatively chaste but underscore the film’s focus on the fragile, perishable goodness of people in the face of greed and fear. Actresses in spaghetti westerns can be so interchangeable, often because roles were given to them at the caprice of producers who were their husbands or boyfriends. I honestly don’t know how Vonetta McGee came to THE GREAT SILENCE but she does the film proud. (Alex Cox was suitably impressed by the film to give McGee a role in his 1984 indie hit REPO MAN.) Had she stayed on in Italy, I’d like to think that McGee could have done well in the cycle of psycho-thrillers were popular between 1969 and 1978. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sergio Martini got down on his knees and begged Vonetta McGee to stay on and star in some of his films, roles that eventually went to Edwige Fenech or Anita Strindberg. Whatever her reasons, though, McGee headed home and never looked back.


McGee had an uncredited walk-on in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1968) with Sidney Poitier and Poitier called her back for a bigger (albeit supporting) role in THE LOST MAN (1969), a remake of Carol Reed’s ODD MAN OUT (1948). The film was poorly received and McGee didn’t get much notice… and that’s where BLACULA comes in. As crass a cash-in as there ever was, this American International Pictures release has earned a substantial cult following in the almost forty years since it was made. It’s an invigorating, slightly outre outing with a script that wisely keeps its sense of the absurd from Bogarting the narrative joint; the film’s capital asset is its cast. Little known at the time, William Marshall became an instant celebrity (if mostly a niche market one) as Mamuwalde, an African prince and diplomat vampirized by a racist Count Dracula (Charles McCauley) in the 18th Century and revived in (then) contemporary Los Angeles. Shot right in Hollywood, the film has regional flavor to burn and a great cast of supporting actors in Thalmus Rasulala, Denise Nicholas, Gorden Pinsent, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Elisha Cook, Jr. and Ketty Lester… but the heart of the film is the moving relationship between Mamuwalde and the modern woman (McGee) who is the reincarnation of the wife from whom he was taken two hundred years earlier.

The Eyes of Vonetta McGee