Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day One Review: Reflections in a Golden Eye

Right off the bat, I'll say that although Reflections in a Golden Eye is far from being a great film, getting to hear Elizabeth Taylor say the line (and I'm paraphrasing here), "She is crazy. She cut off her nipples with gardening shears. Gardening shears!" made the hour and forty-five minutes I spent watching it completely worth it.

Really, Taylor's entire performance as Leonora is the main reason to watch the film. On the surface, Leonora is similar to another great Taylor role, Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but whereas Maggie's selfishness is countered (in the film version) by her basically good intentions, Leonora is just selfish and stupid, the sort of woman who relishes in telling her mentally-unstable neighbor about the time she went riding and saw a thirteen-year-old girl break her neck. Leonora is Maggie without any trace of a conscience, and Taylor, more voluptuous and relaxed here than when she played Maggie, adds depth and life to a film that is otherwise rather flat. Her recitation of all the foods Leonora plans on serving at her dinner party is fantastic, as is the scene in which she strips naked and threatens to drag Marlon Brando out into the street and beat him.

Unfortunately, the rest of Reflections in a Golden Eye lacks the vivacity that she brings to the screen. Based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers, the film tells the story of a closeted army captain (Brando) who falls for the private assigned to care for his horses, not knowing that the private, he of the titular "golden eye," is obsessed with the captain's wife (Taylor). The cast is strong, with Brian Keith and Julie Harris doing good work in supporting roles, but the film is so preoccupied with showing the more sensational aspects of its story -- Leonora walking through the house nude; the private (Robert Forster) riding horses "barebacked and bare-assed;" the captain stroking a phallic-shaped candy bar wrapper -- that it never bothers to let us really get to know the characters, or to give us insight into why they act the way that they do.

Brando, meanwhile, despite exhibiting a few moments of brilliance, as in the scene where the captain inspects himself in the mirror, mumbles his way through most of the film, uttering his lines in such a thick Southern accent that the majority of what he says is unintelligible. The two scenes in which he's teaching a class of young soldiers are particularly mystifying; I assume these scenes were meant to give us glimpses into the inner life of his character, but for all I could tell, he was standing in front of the chalkboard giving an off-key reading of Othello.

I chose Reflections in a Golden Eye for Brando because I wanted to see something from the period in between Mutiny on the Bounty and The Godfather, when his career was in flux and many of his contemporaries were either dead (Dean and Clift) or fashioning new personas for themselves (Newman). I ended up feeling like I was watching an Elizabeth Taylor vehicle with a few guest appearances by the actor formally known as Marlon Brando. He isn't bad in his role; he just rarely seems like he's all there, even in the last scene, which is one of the most ridiculous examples of overacting I've ever seen, on his and Taylor's part.

Grade: C+