Riflessi in un occhio d'oro

God knows what this picture looked like on the printed page--or, indeed, what this cast of talented actors were thinking when they first read it. Elizabeth Taylor probably thought it a hoot. I certainly did, but really...Julie Harris as a woebegone colonel's wife, living on a southern Army base in the 1950s with her sexually-estranged husband and a flamboyant houseboy, who has used pruning shears to--oh never mind. It's really about Marlon Brando as a sexually-repressed major, married to flirtatious belle Taylor but secretly lusting for stud-soldier Robert Forster (who rides his horse "barebacked and bare-assed"). Is it camp, serious, heartfelt or just terrible? Actually, it's all of the above, which is not only what kept me watching but keeps me returning. The moody film, based on Carson McCullers' Gothic novel, feels tampered with, muted in spots where it should be played to the hilt yet overdrawn when it should be subtle, yet this is part of its erratic appeal. Aldo Tonti's vivid cinematography (most especially in the full-color re-release print) is amazing, as is Toshiro Mayuzumi's hyperbolic score. John Huston directed, boldly and with flourish. It's a glorious mess. *** from ****

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.

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.

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