Reflections in a Golden Eye Reviews

An enigmatic, overtly ambitious failure of hot-house Southern Gothic tropes, Reflections in a Golden Eye is weirdly hypnotic and maddeningly opaque experience, but it’s always a joy to watch such a group of actors as John Huston managed to line-up for this disaster.

The story is a dark, twisted pile-up of sub-par Tennessee Williams knockoffs engaging in depraved sexual acts and emotionally damaging personal relationships. Given a painterly gauche of sepia, Reflections tells the story of a repressed homosexual army man (Brando), his unfulfilled carnal wife (Elizabeth Taylor), the colonel she’s not even trying to hide her affair with (Brian Keith), and his wife who’s constantly on the precipice of falling into her emotional fragile and disturbed nature (Julie Harris). Into this foursome comes Robert Forster as the man assigned to take care of Taylor’s prized horse, he also happens to have a penchant for being naked in woods.

Brando’s performance can be taken one of two ways: as something utterly brilliant, or as one of the signs that he stopped caring about the quality of his performances early on and buckled under his own genius shortly after The Fugitive Kind. When I first watched the film I left it thinking that, truly, Brando did begin to crack-up and leave behind the brilliance of A Streetcar Named Desire fairly early into his career. But, for all of the film’s problems haunting you with its miserable characters and images isn’t one of them, the more I thought about his character and the reading he gave it, the more I started to appreciate it. This is a man who’s so filled with self-disgust and hatred that he has inverted to the point of inarticulateness within himself. Of course he’s going to mumble and grumble – what else would his inner (and outer) dialog sound like?

And Taylor as the emasculating, shrill harpy of a wife is a real treat. Although her nude scene is purposefully left cold, without any kind of erotic heat or pervy voyeurism to titillate Brando, and the audience by extension. It’s a definitely, aggressively sexual striptease in front of the husband who doesn’t love or lust for her. It’s a detached, clinical display of her taunting him with her luscious form. This is the kind of role that Taylor truly excelled at.

The rest of the cast performs admirably, but they’re left adrift by Carson McCullers fairly ridiculous plotting. And while Huston tries admirably to throw some kind of intrigue and whip up some kind of interest in the whole thing by literally filming it in a golden hue, it becomes more distracting as an obvious technique than anything else. It effectively works in a few scenes to demonstrate how barren and void that their lives are, but sometimes just feels unnecessary and distracting. I respected it for trying something daring, but it would have been better if they tried it out on something more worth the effort.

I wanted to like this. Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Harris directed by Huston in a film of a novel I liked? This sounded like a dream. And, well, I'd rather it had been.

For starters, the gold-tinted version is borderline nauseating; it's like watching it through a jar of honey. It makes the film unpleasant to look at it, which isn't a good starting-point, no matter what it may hold. The trouble is that it tried to hold too much and ended up dropping the ball.

The main issue I have with this is that half of the emotional thrust of the film is placed on a character (Brando's Maj. Penderton) you don't learn enough about to truly sympathise with. We're introduced to him constantly on breaking point, but we have no normality from him to compare it with, so he ends up coming over as crazy rather than troubled. Yes, you get the point, but that's hardly enough, and what should have been the easiest job in the world is somehow botched. It takes away from the emotional impact one feels watching him go through the things he does. Without that impact, there's really no point other than voyeurism.

The story with Julie Harris's character is handled much better, but, regrettably, it's also less interesting.

The actors try their damnedest to make it salvageable, but there's only so much they can do with what they're given. The screenwriters had a diamond of a subject, and they managed to turn it back into coal.

As an added bonus atop all of this, the ending has what must be the hokiest camera work I've ever seen. It's absolutely hilarious, and it really shouldn't be.