The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

"It just occurred to me, you don't believe I want to repent, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that some people might be all repentance and no sin? I may start a mission to help your kind. Come all ye repentants and let us bring a little sin into your lives." -- Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls)

It's hard to believe the same actor who played Sky Masterson so nimbly in the film version of GUY AND DOLLS would want to suffer through something so repressed as the role of Major Pendleton in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967). Psychosexually Freudian in the extremis, it's from a time (McCullers wrote it in the 1940s) when there was no 'out' of the closet without beatings and jail time. Repression cooked our literature in its egg.

I'd love to love this film, as I love most of John Huston's work and it has so many things going for it, but in the end REFLECTIONS reveals a sad, un-sordid truth: not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp has aged as well as as others. The difference between Carson McCullers and her roster of closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams, is as sweaty summer when it's too hot to move vs. a cool evening with mint julep and minimal mosquitoes. I'd rather watch Richard Burton swill his way through the scenery in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA for the 37th time than watch Brando soak up the masochistic vapors while his wild stallion wife Liz Taylor (her best line, whispered into Marlon's ear: "Son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?") cavorts and is stalked by a young lad who likes to ride naked on Liz Taylor's horse and smell her underwear while she sleeps (Brando is of course in a separate bedroom). In his repressed funk, Brando mistakes the stalker's attentions as queer signals towards his own sweaty obsessive self.

In short here are lots of flustered, coded triangles with old McCullers. Yet for all the litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud symbolism it's all rawther airless. The golden eye refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major, or maybe the sun, or, well, you know how dirty double entendres are the very core and existence of the South. I shudder to guess. But Williams would have flushed out the mythic connections for Huston a wee better, the idol thing seems like an afterthought rather than a crux.

Any similarity to the hindquarters of a horse is strictly intentional.

The whole Freud thing was super huge in the kind of drunken suburban swinger circles depicted in the film during the 1950s, a full circle of coming which Huston embodied in real life, but as a director Huston depended on a source novel and screenwriter who'd faced danger, either from armed men, bulls, drugs, gay bashers, or drinks, and thus was able to write the kind of gutsy harpoon-in-the-eye-of-god prose Huston was best at filming. McCullers suffered terrible illnesses and a lavender marriage but if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Phillipino houseboy genital and nipple mutilating cocktails fashion, why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all, or even in the south, if it's not going to heat to a boil and runneth over into lurid murders and mob violence? Here there's not much to suggest more than a low simmer, and immediately upon boiling, film concludes. And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where be his thunderous, Marc Antony monologue moment? If you go to the Preakness, do you want to see the best horse just stand still and stare longingly at a carrot? Not that the big climax where poor Pendleton genuinely thinks he's about to get lucky isn't moving, brilliantly underplayed (a mere moment to check his hair in the mirror), deeply sad, and bitterly hilarious, but it comes too late, and ends with a ghastly bit of repetitive panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific and ironic but is just clumsy. 

The eye offends thee, no?

The side cast includes Julie Harris as a scenery-nibbler who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins - we never see them), and engages in god knows what with her weird Filipino valet houseboy who has turned her against her cuckolding military husband (Brian Keith). Keith does okay as the indulgent witness and victim of the conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her gay Filipino Ariel (he's fine with it as it allows him to scamper off to rendezvous in the hay with Liz).

And Brando has one great termite moment when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered cavalry cadets and suddenly the romance and resonance attached to a great cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries right in class. For a minute it looks like his whole head is melting down like golden psychedelic spiral sludge, his eyes and lips spread out in a horizontal puddle of darkness and his lips like Donald Duck through a very gradual...  steam....   roller.

Oh Sky Masterson, if only you opened that sin mission....