Reflections in a Golden Eye is a 1967 adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel of the same name by director John Huston.  It is a twisted web of infidelity and hidden truths.  U.S. Army Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) is unhappily married to Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) who in turn is cheating on her husband with their married neighbor, Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith).  Add to the mix, the handsome and mysterious Private L.G. Williams (Robert Forster), who catches the eye of Weldon, but has his eyes set on the wife of the Major. 

The film opens with the promise of murder which is not at all surprising given the caustic relationship between the characters.  It enjoys the classic setup where everyone has a secret, and they are all trapped in close together so that they can pick at each other like a scab until one – or many – of them start to bleed. 

Brando gives a very strange and confounding performance, and not just in his choice of accent. He is hindered by a script that does not really seem to know how to handle Weldon as a character outside of metaphor and allusion.  There is a lot that is left unsaid regarding Weldon, and while we as an audience can pick up on these issues that are just under the surface, Brando’s performance does not always work in a way that makes it easy to understand until we can look back at the film as a whole.  Weldon has dreams and aspirations of advancement, something that the script makes clear, and he is afraid of being passed over for a promotion like Captain Murray Weincheck (Irvin Dugan) had been in the past due to his sensitive nature.   

We see that Weldon’s bravado is all an intricate façade time and again when he is riding the horses and one of the stable hands goes so far as to say the Weldon would never ride a horse if he knew how he looked from behind.  The camera cuts away to show Brando bouncing up and down like a child as the horse trots down the lane.  His ineptitude as an equestrian also sends the message loud and clear that this is a man totally out of control and fighting his own nature. 

Opposite Brando is Taylor in the role of his wife.  She gives a truly irritating and downright poor performance as a woman trapped in a loveless (read: doomed) marriage.  She floats from scene to scene in her own world and does not seem connected to any of the other characters.  Least of all, she has absolutely no on-screen chemistry with Brando, and while it makes sense in context it is hard to believe that they would ever have even found themselves in a place to be married at all.  Even with Keith’s Morris Langdon, their affair is so bullishly handled not only physically by the actors, but also in the script which find’s Morris telling Weldon that “your wife is cheating” as they play a game of Blackjack.   

This comment and the weight it carries is not lost on Morris’ wife, Allison (Julie Harris), who has the most overtly fleshed out role in the film.  After suffering a miscarriage, she becomes depressed and never regains control of her life.  She finds a friend in the flamboyant Filipino houseboy and scene stealer, Anacleto (Zorro David), much to the chagrin of her unfaithful husband.   

There is a scene late in the film where Allison spies someone leaving the Penderton home.  Her reaction to this – initially thinking it may just be a figment of her imagination – speaks volumes to what her home life is like.  It becomes clear that not only has the love towards her faded from her husband’s eyes, but that he fundamentally does not understand the grief in which she is experiencing, and his misunderstanding of her diagnosis has led to a terrible home life no doubt filled with emotional manipulation and gas lighting.  Even though the script is not centered on Allison, we learn enough to know that her arc is not a happy one, but it is the one the film seems most comfortable with handling as it follows her through her depression, anxiety, and eventual heartbreaking conclusion.  

Peering into the lives of these two troubled households, and occasionally daring to tiptoe across the threshold, is Private L.G. Williams.  He is known to Leonora as an expert stable hand but is later brought on to do some yard work for the Penderton’s.  Weldon asks him to cut back the undergrowth in his lawn, but Williams goes too far and removes some of the privacy Penderton enjoys in his life; the first instance of many which will leave the man exposed to the soldier. Williams’ mostly mute presence in these initial moments feels a little underdeveloped and feels strange, but it eventually becomes clear that he has caught the eye and confused the mind of the Army Major.  Williams does not return the same fascination to Weldon, instead, he spends his nights in Leonora’s room among her undergarments while she sleeps and her husband, in another room, is blithely unaware that his greatest temptation is there under his roof.  

Williams and Weldon’s relationship is never really fleshed out, and to be fair it is very one sided, however the two men do share the pivotal scene of the film.  Weldon takes out Firebird, his wife’s prized stallion, and is unable to rear the horse back under his control.  After being bucked by the beast, Williams, who was out for his own private “bare ass to bare back” ride upon his favored black steed, comes to take the reins from Weldon and lead Firebird back to the stables.   

It is here where the strange use of nudity in the film begins to take shape.  Earlier, Williams witnesses through the window Leonora strip down in her bedroom, and while the camera cuts away, we are left to imagine that she berates her uninterested and unaroused husband.   Here, Williams enters the clearing in the forest, naked, to calm and comfort the horse; the symbol of nature which Weldon is unable to control, that of his own latent homosexuality.  The point is made even more clear as the young soldier leads Firebird away.  In this sense, the horse is not just a stand-in for Leonora – the object of Williams’ desire and a thorn in the side of Weldon – but as the naked man approaches Weldon and awakens something deep inside of his superior, he leads away the white horse, and with it, Weldon’s morality. 

Maybe it is due to its the novelistic roots that Reflections takes a less direct approach to the similarly queer-coded Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), another summer-time swelter piece in which Taylor finds herself unhappily married to a Hollywood icon playing a closeted man. Despite being so subdued, Reflections clearly paves the way for Claire Denis’ voyeuristic Beau Travail (1999), which through its own more hypnotic camera work, directly dissects the male gaze in the context of the military. 

Reflections in a Golden Eye still manages to be an ambitious film in what it is seeking to do, especially for the time.  Unfortunately, the melodrama of it all often overtakes the themes of the narrative and never allows for the boiling tensions to erupt until the final moments of the film.  Because of this, much of the symbolism is lost until we reach the conclusion which can make it an unsatisfying 108-minute sit.  That being said, it is in those hours after the film where everything settles down and begins to make sense.  While this small piece can easily be overlooked in both Taylor and Brando’s impressive careers, it remains and important and formative piece of queer American cinema that can still speak to the expectations of masculinity today.