Like a yard sale of the junk in Tennessee Williams’s mind, Reflections in a Golden Eye is a trawl of pre-loved Southern gothic artefacts in various states of disrepair. Directed by John Huston in 1967, it was adapted from a novel by Carson McCullers – a Williams protégé. Brace yourselves.
What might you expect to find at that yard sale? Elizabeth Taylor for one. A range of variable Southern accents for another. Quite possibly a manly man who is secretly gay. Excesses of booze and other narcotics. Lonely people. The repressed. People who are victims of themselves. Self-harm. Sexual transgression. Broken patriarchy. A love of animals and a disdain for humanity.
In beautiful, old-school imagery, Huston spins out a tale set on an army base where Taylor’s horse-loving Leonora, a libidinous harpie, is married to the very proper, super-uptight Major Penderton (Marlon Brando). Into their clearly dysfunctional – too formal by half – set-up comes handsome young Private Williams (Robert Forster, in his debut), a man who knows how to handle a horse (wink wink) and, when he can, enjoys riding one naked through the forest!
While Major P and wife Leonora pursue a life of rigid socialising – card games, drinks evenings, dinner parties and so on – with the likes of Lt Col Morris Langdon (Brian Keith) and his overwrought wife Alison (Julie Harris), Williams starts to form a fixation on the clearly unsatisfied Leonora, which starts out with him lurking outside the house at night but escalates over time.
What does Private Williams want is the question. What do any of these outwardly hyper-conformist, inwardly wayward prisoners of the army system want? Leonora clearly wants a man’s hands on her, from the way she flirts with anything in trousers. As for her husband, in a speech towards the end of the film in which he extols the virtues of army life – “men among men… rough and coarse… hard fitness… they sleep side by side” – his inclinations appear to lie in a different direction. As for Alison, who, as the film opens, has already cut off her nipples with some garden shears, I refer you to the yard sale.
There is one openly, flamingly gay character in this movie. And it’s notable that Anacleto (Zorro David) is the only person who is straightforward and honest. The most normal person in this story by far. As for the rest of them, it is a toss-up whether they have been driven mad by conformity, or driven to conformity by their madness.
Private Williams isn’t so much a character as an ideal of Greek manliness – the naked warrior on a horse being the sort of “hard fitness” the major could admire as if it were on a plinth. (Though Williams, silent and stoic, is also quite insane in his own way too, but then that’s the movie.)
The system of studio censorship was breaking down in 1967 and Huston’s film takes advantage in a way that 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof never quite could. In a way his film is in dialogue with the earlier one – Taylor, wandering accents, a secretly gay man etc etc – though to less dramatic effect.
Brando and Taylor, John Huston directing. This is intended to be big stuff. But the film was sneaked out to barely any fanfare. There is lots to like – Taylor’s hyper-confected shop-soiled Southern belle routine, wandering accent and all. Brando acting her off the screen, which isn’t something you see every day. Aldo Tonti’s beautifully lush cinematography – learned in Italy with the likes of Fellini and Visconti. The original intention was to shoot it all in gold, with just one key object or person picked out in normal colour. The opening credits give some idea what it looked like. If you can find it, the gold-hued version is still out there.
The gold is excessive, but that’s the point. The overwrought and the hysterical fight it out at the level of the psyche – the naked dude on horseback – while these strait-laced characters try to keep the show on the road. Crazy stuff.
Reflections in a Golden Eye – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
