Based on the novel of the same name, Hollywood royalty Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando create quite the bitches brew as a married couple with secrets and desires bubbling to the surface in director John Huston’s sexual psychodrama Reflections in a Golden Eye. Set on a military base in the deep south, Brando plays Major Weldon Penderton, a man whose repressed homosexual desires begin to seep through his masculine military visage, when he is intrigued by a handsome young private (Robert Forster). Elizabeth Taylor gives a magnificent performance as Leonora Penderton, the Major’s cheating wife who enjoys taunting and emasculating her husband with her sexuality, while engaging in an affair with their neighbor Lt.Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith). Houston slowly reels in the film’s opening line – “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed,” in a slow burn of twisted voyeuristic erotica, captured in lush southern gothic beauty by cinematographer Aldo Tonti.
“A superbly controlled exercise in the malevolent torments of despair.” – Time Out
“Reflections is a better film than we had any right to expect. It follows the McCullers story faithfully and without compromise. The performances are superb. Besides Brando, there is Miss Taylor, proving once again as she did in Virginia Woolf that she really can act” – Roger Ebert
