By Erin Free
Though best known for his on-screen villainy in Chinatown, and for his behind-the-camera brilliance on such bona fide Hollywood classics as The African Queen, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon, actor/director John Huston also has a little commented upon career sideline of making bizarre, highly original cult films that almost defy description. Typifying this are such diverse and eye opening films as Wise Blood, The Night Of The Iguana, Fat City, The Life And Times Of Judge Roy Bean and Under The Volcano. Huston’s weirdest, wildest and most cruelly under-celebrated film, however, is 1967’s Reflections In A Golden Eye, a tripped out, fevered Southern Gothic melodrama populated with unusual characters and punctuated with moments of arch and often crazed invention.
Based upon the novel by Carson McCullers (whose gorgeous, idiosyncratic and poetic prose has been beautifully brought to the screen in the likes of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and The Ballad Of The Sad Café), the film tracks the bizarre personal interactions that unfold on a Southern army base. In an amazingly perverse and vanity-free performance (even for him!), the great Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, a latently homosexual military officer whose virility and manhood is constantly questioned by his acidic, venomous wife, Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor in one of her essential Queen Bitch roles), who is in the middle of a depressing affair with the conflicted Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (the underrated Brian Keith is brilliantly affecting), whose own wife, Alison (Julie Harris) is in a tortured funk after cutting off her nipples with a pair of garden shears (!) in response to the death of their child.
But wait, there’s more! In amongst it all is the late Robert Forster’s Pvt. L.G. Williams, who likes going for nude horseback rides (!), and soon becomes the object of lust for Major Penderton, while also heating up his own sexual obsession with Leonora. Throw in a flamboyant, gay, philosophical Filipino houseboy, and you’ve got it all! Also, adding to the film’s kinky allure, upon its initial release, the whole film was suffused with the colour gold, apart from specific items in each scene, which served as jolts of colour. This, however, freaked audiences out even more than the content of the film, and it was released in a normally coloured version.
Funny in a truly twisted way, and filled with all manner of quietly explosive moments (Taylor horse-whipping Brando – in retaliation for him thrashing her prized stallion in a moment of sad, misplaced anger – in front of a group of gussied up dinner party guests has to be seen to be believed), Reflections In A Golden Eye is a work of demented, hothouse brilliance.
