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FRUITCAKES DELUXE For most of us, a good 60% of Marlon Brando’s utterances in Reflections in a Golden Eye are lost through his inexcusable mumbling. Considering the fruitcake material, maybe it doesn’t matter: unless the purpose of Carson McCullers’s gothic is to caution about the dangers of sexual repression, there’s really no other reason for a movie than to set up a chain reaction of audience mockery. But who would have expected director John Huston to help guarantee the howls? With Brando’s hissy fits, Elizabeth Taylor’s flabby ass bitchery and excessive lip-smacking, Julie Harris’ astounding nipple-shearing seriousness, Robert Forster riding horses in the nude and Zorro David’s nauseous swishiness all preserved in a sleepy goldish amber milieu, you do wonder if Huston subversively made a taxidermied campfest. With Scottish writer Chapman Mortimer coalescing from six previous scripts, including treatments by Christopher Isherwood and Francis Ford Coppola, there’s legitimate suspicion a cult movie was intended and perhaps accomplished. When released in 1967, only the more sophisticated found elements to praise, but now, fifty five years later, irrespective of how it’s indulgent psycho drama in dated drag, there are things to salute: Brando provides piercing flashes of communication with his eyes and character idiosyncrasies—in spite of his muttering, he’s great; Taylor shows her often hidden gift for comedy (she’s almost a revelation when penning misspelled invites to a party); Brian Keith’s sanity; the Italian Technicolor Lab’s months-long experiments to get the right complexion. (Initially unpopular, the influence of its calculated brown-out remains favorable among moviemakers.) Always thought the movie would be better (and better received) with a more controlled final scene. Huston’s direction of a climax has seldom been less efficacious, permitting Taylor’s unconvincing screams, permitting Aldo Tonti’s camera to shift without fluidity, permitting the audience to absorb not the shock of the finale but the shock of its botch. Condemned by the Catholic Church, the movie is so surprisingly free of need for censorship TCM airs it uncut. Having wanted to make a movie with Huston since the time she watched him shoot The Night of the Iguana, Taylor insisted on Monty Clift for Reflections, with the director looking askance after using him in The Misfits and Freud. But he agreed. One of the questions I’d have asked her: did she hope the material would free her beloved friend from his closet? My hunch: Monty’s own fears about the part, how it would have caused more exposure of his private life he wasn’t emotionally ready to publicly tackle, is what helped kill him. COMPANION PIECE: The theatrical expressionism and poetic sap of Jean Genet’s addiction to masturbation is quite evident in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie adaptation of Genet’s Querelle de Brest. (And it was evident in Tony Richardson’s version of Genet’s Mademoiselle: you know for what purpose the Italian hunk is used.) Fassbinder, who died of a drug overdose not long after completing Querelle, did what he could to druggishly titillate and compel us to watch in a way Genet might have approved: everything is jaundiced brothellian. Except for the hyped chanting of a male chorus and a few Germanic tangos, the droggy mess may remind you of Huston’s equally sluggy Reflections in a Golden Eye, as Franco Nero, basically in a reprise of Marlon Brando’s Major Penderton, acts as the narrator and unrequited lover of the military stud Querelle, played by stone-faced American Brad Davis. Nero orgasmically spurts lines like “Do I have the charms with which to conquer?” and “Is love like a killer’s den?” Don’t ask for explanations about what’s going on—Querelle is just a dumb, humorless piece of homoeroticism.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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