Reflections in a Golden Eye

Apart from the barely discernible homosexual subtext, there really isn't much to this sudsy cinematic soap opera. The film provides a glimpse into the neurotic lives of two couples (Major Weldon Penderton and his pampered, beautiful wife Leonora; and Lt. Col. Morris Langdon and his spaced-out wife Alison). The four of them live at a military fort in the American South. A mysterious young soldier named Pvt. Williams (Robert Forster), who rides naked on horseback, and who stealthily creeps into Leonora's bedroom at night to contemplate who knows what, is the object of Major Penderton's implied fantasies.

What makes this film so maddening is the unspoken passion, the tacitly erotic obsessions that drive the entire narrative. It's all beneath the surface. The dialogue is largely irrelevant. It's what is not said that's important.

Even though this is a character study, we actually learn very little about the characters. Does Pvt. Williams even have a back-story? All of the characters seem to be in their own fog, their own delusional world, divorced from reality. Indeed, except for one sequence at an institution for the mentally ill, all the scenes take place at the military fort, isolated from the rest of the world.

The film's lighting is neither B&W nor color; it is a dingy, yellowish sepia tone with occasional splats of color. Background music is intermittent and nondescript. The pace of the plot is excruciatingly slow, with very long camera "takes".

The film's acting is acceptable. Elizabeth Taylor and her Cleopatra eyebrows give a nice performance, as does Brian Keith. Marlon Brando, as Major Penderton, nasally mumbles his lines, as if he had marbles in his mouth.

Best remembered perhaps as one of the 1960's films that brought about the MPAA ratings system, "Reflections In A Golden Eye" is stodgy and dull by today's standards. But in its day, this film was bold and daring in its depiction of a topic that was all hush-hush. For that reason, even though its entertainment value is questionable, the film is historically significant.

Marlon Brando's career may have been in a rut at the time, but he got a fine role in John Huston's "Reflections in a Golden Eye". I had never heard of Carson McCullers or her works when I started watching it, but I'm now eager to read her works. This tale of sexual tension and repressed homosexuality on a military base in the 1940s has it all (and I don't just mean a certain scene of Elizabeth Taylor). These are some of the most intense performances that you'll ever see, and the movie features what must've been some of the most extreme scenes allowed on screen at the time.

Definitely worth your time.

"Reflections in a Golden Eye" was recognized by John Huston himself as his most important film of his late period along with "The Man who would be a King". While generally the later is accepted as his masterpiece "Reflections in a Golden Eye" is misunderstood as Huston's "misfire", as a "flop", an opinion with which I tend to disagree. What we have here is a good drama whose story is based on a book by Carson McCullers, featuring superb performances from Marlon Brando who plays a U.S. Army Major in an isolated military fort somewhere in the south, who gradually discovers his homosexuallity and Liz Taylor, simply great here in the role of his cheating wife. The film, which is basically a serious drama, turns out to be something of a cynical human comedy, due to "ridiculousness" of all of it's characters and the way the story is told by film's director - John Huston. Overall it's an intelligent film whose main theme is repression and ultimate frustration of desire with it's tragic consequences. 8/10

Marlon Brando's career was on a downward slide when he appeared in "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (***1/2). His previous film was Charles Chaplain's disastrous "A Countess from Hong Kong" in which he gave one of his worst performances. In "Eye" he proved that as an actor he was still capable of being as daring and surprising as he once was as a sexually repressed Army Major. Widely misunderstood at the time of its release, John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel is a witty and provocative tragicomedy in which none of the characters succeeds in escaping from their own self-imposed prisons. There have probably never been two more incompatible married couples in the movies than the brooding introverted officer played by Brando and his bawdy, outgoing wife, a fine part for Elizabeth Taylor at her funniest and most natural. Complementing them are Brian Keith as a rather dim but basically good-natured fellow officer who is having an affair with Taylor, and Julie Harris as his hypersensitive invalid wife. Zorro David also scores as her pretentiously effete Filopino houseboy. One of the many fascinating things about this film is watching how these characters interrelate without ever making a real connection. Director Huston finds a great deal of humor (most of it intentional, I'm convinced) in this sometimes hard-to-take, but fascinating film.

The time is late 1948 and the setting is a U.S. Army post in Georgia, bordering on a forest preserve…

A Southern amoral wife called Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) finds a way for her stream desire in an adulterous affair with Lt. Col. Langdon (Brian Keith), carried on almost openly…

Leonora gives aperture to her forcefulness and vigor in a passion for horses and riding… She is attached to a handsome white horse she calls Firebird and she provokes her husband by telling him that the animal is indeed a stallion with the emotional nature of man...

Leonora's husband (Marlon Brando) is a devious, insecure, impotent Army major, a hidden homosexual preoccupied with an unsociable, lonely rider who canters around the field in the nude and whose sexual emotional stress is diminished, secretively, at the bedside of the major's wife holding her clothes and looking fixedly at her marvelous hot body…

Private Williams (Robert Forster) is another lonely man fascinated by the fiery Leonora and her thoughtful and gentle comments to him… He takes to visiting the Penderton house at night looking attentively in the windows, observing with total recall and complete joy Leonora's nakedness, but also watching the Major in his study…

Keith's neurotic wife (Julie Harris) is well aware of her husband's affair with Leonora but she only feels well from her close friendship with her houseboy, Anacleto (Zorro David), an affected companion who shares her penchant for the arts and is in every way the opposite of her abrupt, strong husband…

Flavored with bitter insinuations and insulting sarcasms, Brando and Taylor's few scenes have enough flames to burn the silver screen… He's a tormented human being while she's delicious but shrill and insensitive… Aware of her physical beauty she fights back when she's rejected, instigating him with her impudent, insolent, shameless manner that offend his very being