• U.S.

Cinema: Gallery of Grotesques

2 minute read
TIME

“There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” So begin both Carson McCullers’ novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, and this film based on it. Thereafter the two follow divergent paths. In her book, love was a self-inflicted wound, and the South a theater of the absurd. Director John Huston spills the novel’s poetry on the way to the screen, leaving only its gothic husk and a gallery of grotesques.

At an Army base live a proud major (Marlon Brando) and his vain wife (Elizabeth Taylor). An inept husband and worse horseman, Brando is continually left at the post while Taylor goes riding with her lover (Brian Keith). Keith’s wife (Julie Harris) is a housebound psychotic who he insists is normal until Taylor throws him one of the more memorable lines of her or anyone else’s film career: “She cut off her nipples with a pair of garden shears—you call that normal? Garden shears!”

Harris is not alone in abnormality. Brando, it develops, is a latent homosexual. The unknowing object of his love is a virginal enlisted man who, in turn, is shyly in love with Taylor. Nightly, as Brando wanders outside, the soldier enters his house, steals up to Taylor’s bedroom and watches her snooze until dawn; then the tame voyeur flees back to the barracks.

When she began Reflections, Author McCullers admitted, “I had no idea who was going to shoot whom.” But where the book’s suspense was killing, the movie’s is merely deadening. Long before its violent conclusion, the audience has ceased to care about the hung-up characters. As a cracked Southern belle, Julie Harris is the only member of the cast who reflects the distinctive McCullers quality of loneliness and terror. The others are merely mannerists. All that remains praiseworthy is the film’s extraordinary photographic technique. Seemingly shot in black and white, the picture is actually severely muted Technicolor. Thus from time to time, faded reds and golds seep through the images to give them an eerie, trance-like quality.

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