The Incredible Melting Marlon

"It just occurred to me, I 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). Psychosexual, 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, and repression cooked our literature in its egg. Now it seems hysterically overwrought, but, as Bing Crosby sang, beautiful.

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 painfully shows that not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp writers are born equally cinematic. The difference between Carson McCullers and her repressed, sweaty, closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams is as a sweaty summer when it's too hot to move, vs. a cool evening with 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 struggle to keep himself awake as his character soaks up the masochistic vapors of a southern cavalry unit while struggling to keep it together with a wild stallion like bored Liz Taylor ("son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?) while stalking a very young cadet 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 by mutual agreement). For all the litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud pop-up book symbolism, it's rawther airless. The golden eye refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major.

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 at the time, a circle Huston embodied, but as a director Huston needed a writer who'd faced dangerous men, bulls, drugs or drinks enough to write the kind of gutsy harpoon in the eye of god stabbing things Huston was best at filming. McCullers namely had terrible illnesses. You could divulge a lavender hue in her marriage, and illnesses as repression if you wanted, and if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Phillipino houseboy genital and nipple mutilating cocktails in the sun way, why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all, or 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 the gay slang permutations of the phrase 'golden eye.' And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where his thunderous, Marc Antony 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 moment Pendleton thinks he's about to get lucky isn't both moving, brilliantly underplayed (a mere moment to check his hair in the mirror), deeply sad and hilarious. But it comes too late, and ends with a ghastly bit of repetitive bit of panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific but is just clumsy and headache inducing. 

The side cast includes Julie Harris as a scenery nibbling girl who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins), and her weird, very McCullers-ish Philipino valet houseboy who works Harris against her cuckolding military half-baked husband like the only uncowed sprite in a slow motion golden alternate reality. Keith does okay as the indulgent witness of these two weird people's conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her Ariel, and as Liz's lover, and Brando has one great termite moment - when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered class, and suddenly the emotional connection of a cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries right in class, and 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 mission....