Cinema: Gallery of Grotesques

"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...

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