Reflets dans un oeil d'or

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 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

"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

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.