smoldering desires
by
Douglas Messerli
Chapman
Mortimer and Gladys Hill (screenplay, based on the novel by Carson McCullers),
John Huston (director) Reflections in a Golden Eye / 1967
I
recall seeing John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye when it
originally premiered in US movie theaters in 1967 when I was 20. I certainly
comprehended, at that age, what the film was all about. Three years later I met
Howard—after a long year in New York City in which I was actively involved
(nearly every night) in the gay scene—sharing in what is now a 50-year
relationship. But I don’t think it dawned on me, at that time, just how
audacious this film was, directed as it was by the heavy-drinking macho Huston with
its sexually gay closeted “hero” performed by every woman’s heartthrob, Marlon
Brando, sharing the love of a wife, Elizabeth Taylor—acting as if she were auditioning
for the film in which she won awards for just the year previously, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—with another more outwardly heterosexual neighbor,
acted by Brian Keith.
Throw into this simmering pot a feu
(“pot on the fire”) the highly neurotic character played by Julie Harris—despondent
over the death of her son she has cut off her nipples with a scissors— attended
by a gay Filipino houseboy named Anacleto (Zorro David), who dances at the drop
of his mistresses’ stitches and paints while sitting at her feet long into the
night—and you know you are in a world that could exist only in the imagination
of writer Carson McCullers, who prefaces her story with such a matter of fact
statement, ““There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was
committed,” that when the murder finally is committed we are not truly shocked.
What is disconcerting is the intensity
with which each of these characters suffer the various torches lit from within.
Perhaps the list complex is the spoiled southern belle, Leonora, whose daddy
was evidently once the camp commander, and who hence has lived a life wherein she
often proves that she is stronger than any man on the base. As a child she
played polo equal to some of the male seniors, and throughout the film she
rides her beloved horse Firebird almost as if she were dancing out the
captivity briefly imposed upon the firebird of Stravinsky’s ballet. As I
mentioned above, through Anacleto, music and dance is equally central in the
home of Major Morris Langdon (Keith), Leonora’s current lover.
He wife Alison Langdon, who knows of her
husband’s affair and is secretly plotting a divorce, is so psychologically frail
that she doesn’t even attempt to truly conceive of how she might survive
without her Langdon, let alone imagine that he might use the situation to
gently lock her away in an upscale institution for the slightly mentally
disturbed. Soon after Alison dies, apparently of a heart disease, but in
McCullers’ highly symbolic world we also know it is another problem of the
heart, her husband’s disinterest in and his ultimate betrayal of her.
Even the seemingly level-headed Langdon appears to be a bit off-kilter
when, after his wife’s death, Anacleto disappears. Time and again he tells Major
Penderton (Brando) that he just wishes for the Filipino’s return—while
continuing to argue that if the former houseboy could only serve in the
military, he would be “straightened” out. Clearly there is a great deal of
denial and misconception of how sexuality defines one even from the most
reasonable of McCullers’ characters. Even Penderton tires of his friend’s
laments for the loss of Anacleto. Indeed, we might almost be tempted, given the
other characters’ deeply burning fires of the heart, that Langdon is obsessed
with the houseboy in a manner similar to his wife’s dependence upon her
companion.
Far deeper than these figures, however,
is Penderton, who is painfully forced to play the spartan-like stoic while
slowly coming to terms with his latent homosexuality with manifests itself in a
enlisted man, L. G. Williams, who regularly takes a black mare out for a ride
in a nearby meadow, where he strips off his clothes to enjoy a true “bareback”
experience.
What he doesn’t know is that the young and
very innocent Williams (Robert Forster), who according to his bunk mates is
still a virgin, has become transfixed by Penderton’s wife, gradually turning
into a complicated voyeur who, while Leonora sleeps, slips into the Penderton
home and into her bedroom where he watches over her, rubs his face against her
blouses, and sniffs out her perfumes. These scenes of extreme voyeurism, in
fact, are the most truly sexual that this highly restrained film offers the
viewer.
Huston, in the original filming, restored
in the newest version I saw the other day, muted all the colors of Penderton’s
world, turning them into a kind of dingy brown that snaps the colors of the female
characters’ costumes (particularly those of Leonora) into a focus that is
almost glarish. Is it any wonder that Penderton detests all his wife’s highly
colorful bric-a-brac.
It is hard to say which of the two men,
Penderton or Williams is the more innocent, since they both can never act on
their secret passions.
Yet, Williams, we recognize is a truly
gentle soul who nurses Firebird back to health and attempts basically to keep
to himself, despite the taunts of his fellow enlisted soldiers.
On the other hand, in order to punish his
wife’s emasculation of him and, perhaps, just to catch another glimpse of
Private Williams, Penderton regular borrows Firebird, painfully spurring the
horse on and, on one dat after he in thrown, brutally thrashing the horse, an
act that Leonora repeats on her husband’s own face during one of her bi-annual camp
get-togethers. We recognize that violence has become a way with both husband
and wife in order to play out their dissatisfactions.
When she was still living at home, Alison
twice saw Williams entering the next-door house, but each time she has
attempted to tell others they have simply accused her of imagining things. So
too, actually observing one of Williams’ late-night entries, he imagines that
his metaphorical white-knight is suddenly arriving to allay his sexual longings.
Penderton attempts to comb his hair into place, turns on and then off the
light, leaving his bedroom door slightly ajar.
When the Private does not arrive at his
doorway, he enters the hall and walks up the stairs to his wife’s room, in
which Williams drops to the floor stroking Leonora’s clothing.
The
inevitable and final action of outrage, as the author has previously suggested,
is almost insignificant. It will be written up, surely, as a response to an act
of breaking and entering. In her husband’s seeming attempt to protect his wife,
Leonora may even begin to admire him for a while.
Yet
the true desires of these characters will never to known or salved.
Los
Angeles, July 18, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment