Riflessi in un occhio d'oro

There's a melting pot and into it's thrown, the souls of folk who sink like a dead stone, all have crosses they must bear, after lives of wear and tear, as they've found themselves remote, distant, alone. Of its time the themes reflect certain brutality, of an individual and rationality, where the lines one cannot cross, are tattooed, scored, burnt, embossed, on the culture of this world and its normality. The performances are great, so is the cast, from a director who commands a certain class (excepting 'The Man Who Would Be King' which is trash), it might just touch a nerve, just depending on your curve, a disconnection from today, back to the past.

"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

Reflections in a Golden Eye came out at an interesting transitional period for gay people. The Code that had dominated what could and could not be shown on the screen was just being lifted. That Code had succeeded in making gay people all but invisible by Hollywood standards. But it was two years before the Stonewall Rebellion which gave the gay rights movement a political voice.

Originally Montgomery Clift was scheduled to do this film with three time screen partner Elizabeth Taylor, but Clift died before the film started shooting. Marlon Brando took his place and in my opinion gave a very underrated performance as the repressed latent homosexual Major married to Elizabeth Taylor.

Brando and Taylor dusted off a couple of southern accents previously used in films, Brando from Sayonara and Taylor from Raintree County. But the characters here are vastly different from the characters portrayed in both of those other films.

Although certainly given Clift's background he was eminently qualified to play a repressed gay man, I'm not sure he would have been the type to have played an authority figure like Major Penderton here. Brando was far more the type. The part of the wife was Taylor made for Liz and she went to town with it.

I wonder what those people who want to keep gays out of the military would say about Brando. Brando's burgeoning homosexuality is finding an outlet in a raging crush on a handsome private played by Robert Forster. Forster during his off hours likes to walk and ride horses in the buff and sneaks into Brando's house to play with Liz Taylor's lingerie. Liz is having an affair with Brando's immediate superior Brian Keith who has an invalid and mentally disturbed wife in Julie Harris. And Harris spends most of her time with her very effeminate Filipino houseboy, Zorro David.

Of course this is a recipe for tragedy and tragedy does come. Author Carson McCullers, herself a lesbian, created some unforgettable characters here.

Reflections in a Golden Eye was way before its time. Today the film and Director John Huston would have gotten far better reviews than the film did in 1967.

This movie isn't for everybody. Huston, Taylor, Brando and the rest of the cast took some serious artistic risks back in 1967, and a lot of people didn't like the product; 50 years on, a lot of people still won't.

If one comes to it cold, hearing only that it is only a movie about "a closeted homosexual in the military", which is true of the Brando character, and expects some kind of serious dramatic narrative experience - like for example in "The Sergeant" which also came out in 1968 - the approach of "Reflections", which I think is not unlike that of a Beckett play, will be a surprise, and one might say, "this is a weird movie - it's not a good drama."

But I believe that would be a mistake. I don't mean that one kind of approach is "better" than the other, only that different kinds of movies with different kinds of artistic excellence as their goals shouldn't be measured by the same yardstick.

The action of this film is pretty much indifferent to place and setting; it doesn't need to be in the South and it doesn't need to be on a military base. It is sometime in the period from 1945-1960 when people of privilege spent their evenings at each other's houses, playing cards and drinking way more hard liquor than today. In fact the time and setting blurred in my view into a sort of dreamlike background, not demanding to be like a real place or time.

There are two military officers. There are their wives, whose thwarted lives are filled by avocations and disorders - sex, alcohol, and horsewomanship, or art, classical music, and depression. Their wives have admirers. One is the enlisted man played by Robert Forster, who elicits and then upsets one category after another. Another is the Filipino servant played by Zorro David (his only movie ever) with flamboyant swishiness, but is he really gay or are we being tempted to overassume? It's only what we see and judge, and neither can be trusted.

All have secrets, concealing who they really are while trying to figure out who the other people are, sometimes successfully, more often not. People read people and situations incorrectly and act upon their bad understanding and send the activity off in another direction. When people think they are unobserved they act much differently, comforting themselves in ways that are not provided for in the conventions that surround them. To borrow the thoughts of a character, they are all square pegs trying to deal with the round holes they have been hammered into by others or themselves.

And if that all reads sort of like the universal experience of people, that's sort of the point, I think.

I don't think it's perfect, but every time I try to pick a flaw I start to wonder if the artists didn't intend it just that way for a reason. Some detractors have noted that the Brando character's accent is just incomprehensible at times - I turned on closed captioning eventually. But then at one of those times he was giving instructions to a subordinate, who then doesn't carry them out properly, so was this on purpose? I didn't understand why the frenzied camera work in the final scene was done that way either. But was it meant to convey something? These people are not easily dismissed.

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.