Reflections in a Golden Eye *** (1967, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Brian Keith, Julie Harris, Robert Forster) – Classic Movie Review 7185

Director John Huston’s salacious and compulsive but awkward 1967 high heat Deep South melodrama Reflections in a Golden Eye is based on the Carson McCullers novel and boasts the right cast on compelling form, particularly Marlon Brando as US Army Major Weldon Penderton and Elizabeth Taylor as his wife Leonora Penderton, a mismatched couple who are clearly not enjoying their unsatisfying marriage.

In a peacetime Georgia barracks, the repressed major (Brando) and his sensual wife (Taylor) spend a lot of their time lusting — he after soldier Private L G Williams (Robert Forster), who goes bareback riding, she after their next door neighbour, married Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith). Morris’ wife, Alison Langdon (Julie Harris) had a miscarriage and a nervous breakdown, and now likes sensitive men such as Captain Murray Weincheck (Irvin Dugan) and the couple’s faithful flamboyant Filipino houseboy Anacleto (Zorro David).

Everybody seems to be enjoying themselves with the steamy, perverse material, particularly director Huston, who makes it look good with the help of Aldo Tonti’s Technicolor cinematography (the Warner Bros studio blocked their golden colour experiments by releasing it in a full-colour print). The screenplay by Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill is based on a novel by Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams’s friend, and the rather gothic sexual piece is very much in his style.

Huston disliked the homosexual actor Montgomery Clift after they worked together on Freud (1962) and argued against Clift’s friend Taylor’s pleas to re-cast him as Major Penderton. But Clift died of a heart attack on 23 July 1966, and Brando replaced him. It was filmed between October and December 1966.

Reflections in a Golden Eye also features Gordon Mitchell, Fay Sparks, Douglas Stark, Al Mulock, Ted Beniades and John Callaghan.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7185

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com