REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE 1967

One of the more suspect affectations among the film-school cognoscenti (and there are many) is the lazy, ofttimes wholesale, approbation afforded offbeat, abstruse, or otherwise boring films in an effort to appear possessed of a more discerning aesthetic sense. Though rooted in the not-unfounded notion that the scope of film should encompass more than just mass-market fare, too frequently this democratic ideal gives way to a baseless elitism and a knee-jerk aligning of oneself with the unpopular just because it is unpopular. 

I know whereof I speak, because, as a former film student, I've been guilty of such behavior myself. More hours than I care to think about have been spent in dark theaters pretending to enjoy some execrable, masturbatory piece of self-indulgence merely because it was trashed by mainstream critics. A sophomoric game of "one-upmanship" was common practice with me and my friends at film school (The San Francisco Art Institute), each of us attempting to best the other in professing love for a film more unlikely and unknown than the last. 

"A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and grotesque."

I mention this as a kind of preemptory self-defense/explanation, noting my awareness that heralding John Huston's arty, much-maligned, Reflections in a Golden Eye may appear more than a little pretentious. That may be the impression, but I really think that this would be a widely-liked film if only more people knew about it. A victim of a transitional era in film that had no idea of how to market such an unusual movie, this is one amazing film that has (in my opinion) withstood the test of time. Distanced from the shock value of its once-taboo theme of homosexuality, and removed from the movie-star tabloid distractions of its two once-controversial stars, Reflections in a Golden Eye can at last be seen for what it is: a searing character piece boasting a host of fine performances and John Huston at his best as director.

 Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora Penderton

  Marlon Brando as Major Weldon Penderton

Julie Harris as Alison Langdon

Brian Keith as Lt. Col. Morris Langdon

Robert Forster as  Pvt.  L.G. Williams

Zorro David as  Anacleto

A last-gasp entry in the beloved (to me, anyway) sub-genre of "Southern Gothic," Reflections in a Golden Eye peels away the placid exterior of life in a peacetime military base to reveal the madness and repressed passions that lie beneath the imposed order of barracks, military protocol, and rigid conformity. 

Its plot is steeped in southern-fried dread: Robert Forster is a sexually repressed soldier who develops a scopophilic fixation on Elizabeth Taylor, the sexually rapacious wife of army officer Marlon Brando. Brando, who tolerates Taylor's affair with fellow officer Brian Keith (whose mentally disturbed wife, Julie Harris, has recently mutilated herself out of grief over the death of a child), is a latent homosexual who becomes sexually obsessed with Forester.  

Houston, rather ingeniously, takes a stylistic cue from the book's title and not only shoots the film in muted tones of gold, but films the events from an emotional remove. We are not invited into the minds of these characters so much as we are entreated to observe their piteously empty and sad behavior as though we are voyeurs ourselves: seeing it all from a distance, reflected and distorted in an immense, all-seeing, golden eye. When the film ends and we have time for the events that have unfolded before us to sink in, it dawns that the reflection has been of ourselves the entire time.

A favorite Elizabeth Taylor screen moment.
Leonora challenges her husband's masculinity:

"Son, have you ever been collared and dragged out into the street and thrashed by a naked woman? Huh?"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It's always a challenge for a movie to ask us to identify with characters which represent, in large part, aspects of ourselves we look to the movies to help us to forget. Reflections in a Golden Eye has much to tell us about pain, compassion, and the fact that everyone harbors within themselves something dark and hidden within themselves that they are certain would render them unworthy of love if revealed. Its a movie that doesn't ask you to approve of its characters, but rather, to merely acknowledge their humanity. Like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye is a novel without a hero, and as such, we're deprived of uplift, moral victory, or reassuring messages. What I admire about the film is how it shows, with sensitivity and insight, the ways in which  the bizarre and even perverse, when removed from the accusing eye of moral judgment, often reveals itself to be nothing more or less than just human vulnerability.

Symbols of desire: The  Major, surrounded by the fetish objects of a male physique photo and a silver spoon stolen from a fellow officer, fondles a phallic candy wrapper discarded by the soldier who has become the object of his obsession

  

PERFORMANCES

Marlon Brando has always been an uneven kind of actor to me, but his performance here is outstanding and my favorite of all of his screen portrayals. Its one of those naked performances that actually makes you uncomfortable because he allows you to see him so emotionally exposed. Jokingly referred to as "Mr. Mumbles" by co-star Taylor (as relayed in the terrific book on the making of the film, "Troubles in a Golden Eye" by William Russo & Jan Merlin), Brando's sometimes garbled line-readings are at last made intelligible thanks to the "subtitles" option on the DVD.

When I young, Elizabeth Taylor was such a gossip magazine staple that it was kind of easy to dismiss her as just a movie star. I always thought she was beautiful, but it was only after I grew up that I came to appreciate what a gifted actress she was. She is wonderful here, playing a kind of sexually self-assured bubblehead (note the scene where she writes out the party invitations) unwittingly leading men to their doom. A vision of perhaps the kind of woman The Day of the Locust's Faye Greener would have grown up to be. Also, special mention has to be made of Brian Keith who surprised the hell out of me. Always an underrated actor, the way in which he takes a macho stereotype role and fashions out of it something genuinely heartbreaking, is nothing short of alchemy.

 THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I'm crazy about cinema images that contain, in mere seconds of screen time, enough acuity, poetry, and beauty to equal a volume of written text or a concert of  music. The scenes wherein it is revealed that the sullenly distant Forester takes regular sojourns into the woods to doff his clothes and blissfully ride the horses he loves so much, are really haunting. Rendered even more so by the golden glow of the beautiful cinematography (reverted back to standard Technicolor a week after the film's release. The DVD edition restored Huston's original vision).

 THE STUFF OF DREAMS

There are many memorable sequences in the film, but the one that seems to stay with me is one that is almost Hitchcockian in its construction. It happens late in the film, at a point in the story when the major has so fully resigned himself to his obsession that he has taken to following the young soldier along the streets at night (something the soldier is not exactly unaware of). One evening, while following on a crowded street, an auto accident occurs behind the major. Everyone on the street, including the soldier, turns to see what has happened or runs to be of assistance. The major doesn't flinch or look behind him at all. Throughout, his eyes remain, fixed and unblinking, exclusively on the soldier. The effect of the scene is so powerful, the first time I saw it I recall feeling my abdominal muscles tense, as if receiving a blow to the stomach.

There's a real poignancy to the pain that must be felt by individuals who cannot, will not, or are unable to, openly express who they are and be true to their natures. To today's audiences, films that deal with  repressed homosexuality may appear dated and perhaps even a little quaint. But I caution those who would think that the broader freedoms of today signal inclusive liberation. They don't. Indeed, one might even argue that our society today has no fewer deeply closeted gay men than in McCullers' time; the only difference is that now they're more apt to manifest as "gay for pay" porn stars; homophobic recording artists; and married, anti-gay legislating politicians.

  

In a marvelous scene, the major poses the following provocative question to the intolerant lieutenant (and, more importantly, to himself) who has just stated that his wife's effeminate houseboy, Anacleto (the only remotely happy person in the film), would have been unhappy, but better off, had the Army been given a crack at making him into a man.
This question was posed by Carson McCullers 70 years ago and it remains one that should be asked of, say, the anti same-sex marriage proponents of today:

  "You mean that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for a square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?"

Just brilliant.

Leave The Children Home

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE BOY FRIEND 1971

The decision to use a still from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend as the representative image for this blog was an easy one. From the time I first saw this movie in 1971 at age 14 at the Alhambra theater in San Francisco, it has remained, unchallenged in all these years, the one film which epitomizes all the magic, artistry and creativity that lie at the core of cinema's unique capacity to inspire dreams and fuel the imagination.

Flights of Fancy
Twiggy as the "Spirit of Ecstasy" hood ornament on a vintage Rolls Royce

A surprising, if not shocking, "G"-rated departure for the director who, during this time was making a name for himself (that name being “enfant terrible”) with his exuberantly impassioned, censorship-baiting, historical dramas; The Boy Friend is "based on" a 1954 musical comedy by Sandy Wilson that spoofed '20s theatrical fluff like No, No, Nanette.  I place "based on" in quotations because, as imagined by Ken Russell, this adaptation of The Boy Friend bears but a scant resemblance to its source material. In fact, it's really like no musical I've ever seen.
Refashioning this precious little musical comedy (which afforded Julie Andrews her Broadway debut) into a scathingly trenchant commentary on show biz clichés, theatrical pretensions, thespian vanity, and Hollywood dream-weaving, Russell creates something akin to a cinematic Russian nesting doll: a spoof within a satire within a pastiche within an homage. A droll valentine to Hollywood musicals, it somehow manages to be terribly sweet and sprightly while also  being howlingly bitchy.

Twiggy as Polly Brown

Christopher Gable as Tony Brockhurst

Glenda Jackson as Rita Monroe

Tommy Tune as Tommy

Antonia Ellis as Maisie

Barbara Windsor as Rosie

Max Adrian as Max Mandeville

Vladek Sheybal as Cecil B. De Thrill

The plot, as reworked by Russell is this: A seedy theater company in 1930's Portsmouth, England is putting on a somewhat threadbare production of The Boy Friend when they learn that the great Hollywood director, Cecil B. De Thrill (Sheybal), is in the audience. Onstage, amidst technical disasters large and small, members of the troupe attempt to sabotage and upstage one another for De Thrill's attention. Backstage, rampant egos, rivalries, and romantic intrigues compound the drama presented by the inexperienced stage manager (Twiggy) having to go on in place of the show's ailing star (Glenda Jackson!) who is laid up with a fractured ankle. Throughout (in large-scale set pieces), De Thrill imagines what his film version will look like, while, in turn, the cast members project their personal wish-fulfillment fantasies onto the material they're performing. Whew!

The striking of archly theatrical poses serves as a device to distinguish the stage acting from all the insincere play-acting going on backstage

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Boy Friend just may be the first deconstructionist / auteurist musical. Ken Russell rather brilliantly takes an innocuous, sweet-natured musical — with nothing more on its mind than idealized nostalgia — and uses it as a vehicle through which to explore the themes of the demythologizing of popular art, the artifice of romanticism, and the passion of creativity. The very themes he returns to in film after film. The way in which Russell turns his lens on the glamour images of '30s Hollywood (as popularized in its musicals and the promise held forth in their romantic clichés) - and contrasts these with the  shabby dreams and unglamorous realities of a tatty theater troupe, makes The Boy Friend a cheerier, but no less piercing , thematic companion-piece to those other Depression-era masterpieces of deconstructed Hollywood myth: The Day of The Locust & They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

In this musical sequence, Maisie (Antonia Ellis) attempts to convince movie director C.B. De Thrill that taking her to Hollywood with him would be no gamble...if you get my cruder meaning.

All in Fun? - The elaborate recreations of Busby Berkeley-style production numbers evoke the escapist entertainments of the past. When fantasy was king and Hollywood was known as the Dream Machine

The more humdrum reality

The Boy Friend is such a fun movie that it is easy to overlook the fact that Russell rather ingeniously uses Hollywood musical  clichés to comment on the way in which these Depression-era escapist fantasies fed (and mislead?) the penny-ante dreams and illusions of the populace. This is years before Dennis Potter would cover similar territory in the BBC TV drama, Pennies from Heaven.

PERFORMANCES
A true ensemble piece, The Boy Friend is one of those rare films (like Young Frankenstein) where everyone is so perfect in their roles that you can't single out an individual favorite performance. Like many directors in the '70s, Russell often worked with the same actors, creating a kind of film-to-film repertory company. The Boy Friend was my first exposure to Ken Russell so the pleasure of seeing gloomily dramatic actors from The Devils or Women in Love exhibiting such gleeful dexterity in singing, dancing, and comedy, was  a pleasure I had to experience in reverse. Quite deservedly, Twiggy received above-the-title billing and was promoted heavily on the film's release, but the movie is full of sensational actors and keenly delineated performances.

There's No Business Like Show Business: The entire cast of The Boy Friend

Standouts: Max Adrian as the beleaguered company manager; the wonderful Murray Melvin...looking as if he hadn't aged a day since 1961's A Taste of Honey; my personal fave, the beautiful Georgina Hale; that pint-sized, scene-stealer Barbara Windsor; and of course, the dynamo that is Antonia Ellis, who almost walks away with the film. Providing the film's splendid choreography and plenty of dreamboat appeal is former ballet dancer, Christopher Gable. He and Twiggy display a genuine likeability and chemistry together, which is welcome since their scenes are the anchors of sincerity necessary to stabilize all the cutthroat boat-rocking of the other characters.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Ken Russell's films rarely cease to dazzle the eye. In The Boy Friend the meticulous period detail of Shirley Russell's ingenious costumes and Tony Walton's witty and breathtaking set designs make for one eye-popping experience.

Sur Le Plage
Jellyfish perform a sand-dance while starfish sway in rhythm!
I'm sorry, but this is just brilliant. I don't know what kind of mind would think of such a thing, but I wish I had one just like it

Perfect Young Ladies- An example of Shirley Russell's keen eye for period costuming

Another peerless Tony Walton set design

 The late Shirley Russell (Ken's first wife) designed the costumes for every Ken Russell film from Women in Love to Valentino

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What played a significant factor in my early fascination with The Boy Friend was that I was unfamiliar with the work of Busby Berkeley at the time. Sure, I watched a lot of old movies on TV, but I had an elder sister who tended to monopolize the channel selector - she hated musicals and had a penchant for "black & white-shoe" pictures (her name for 50s teenage-delinquent movies. The "black & white shoe" sobriquet, a reference to the compulsory 50s accessory of saddle shoes). Consequently, I grew up with a vast awareness of the entire Mamie Van Doren oeuvre, but little knowledge of cinema choreography. I've since seen almost everything Busby Berkeley has had a hand in, and though I wouldn't have thought it possible... not after seeing Carmen Miranda cavorting amongst a sea of oversized bananas in The Gang's All Here... but in The Boy Friend Ken Russell, as some critic must have certainly noted, really manages to out-Berkeley, Berkeley.

My lasting favorite and the most beautiful sequence in the film is the number that takes place atop a giant gramophone turntable. It's a homage to a sequence in 42nd Street and it's an absolutely smashing piece of filmmaking. I've never forgotten it.

The Boy Friend ranks top among my "comfort movies": those films I return to time and time again for that feeling of familiar pleasure they always guarantee. Like a child who giggles anew at the same “knock-knock” joke endlessly repeated, there is something so delightfully soothing about revisiting a beloved film that has the power to always cheer you up. Every known line of dialog, each dependable laugh, all the recognized pleasures…they reignite my sense of nostalgia (which has really increased now that I’ve reached the age of having something to actually be nostalgic about) and invite me to surrender to the long-ago-discovered charms of an old acquaintance and friend.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 1977, The Boy Friend's scene-stealing Maisie (Antonia Ellis) danced and sang in this spectacular TV commercial for Sugar Free Dr. Pepper. In this ad choreographed by Arlene Phillips of Can't Stop the Music and Annie, Ellis plays the waitress at a diner and adopts a pretty nifty American accent. The oversized pinball machine set featured in the commercial wouldn't have been out of place in Ken Russell's own pinball opera, Tommy (1975).

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK 1969

The label of "misogynist" has followed the late director Robert Altman around since audiences were first invited to laugh at and identify with the anti-female, frat-boy antics of that annoyingly smug '70s geek duo of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (hands down my least favorite Altman film).

Despite being responsible for some of the more cringe-worthy scenes of cruelty to women ever attributed to a single director (the coke-bottle-to-the-face scene in The Long Goodbye is the worst), in interviews, Altman has always asserted, rather persuasively, that he was, in fact, very sympathetic and respectful of women and that his films merely reflected...as a form of critique, one assumes...a reality for many women in a sexist culture. Of course, this argument would hold a good deal more weight were the women in his films not so frequently the sexualized objects of the male gaze, or depicted so unsympathetically in comparison to the male oppressors in the scene. (As reliable as a Hitchcock cameo, an Altman film almost always features a scene of a woman in some state of blunt nudity [usually in the presence of some form of humiliation] while male characters remain chastely clothed.)

But while Robert Altman may get it wrong a good deal of the time when it comes to depicting women onscreen, he's also one of the few directors, who, when he gets it right, does so spectacularly. Putting M*A*S*H aside, a film I consider to be sophomoric, boys' club dreck in spite of its reputation, Altman has an otherwise impressive track record of providing terrific roles for women in his films. The women may not be pillars of feminist ideology (in fact, almost all are neurotic or downright insane, as are most of the people in Altman films, anyway), but they are dimensional, recognizably human, and always compelling.

In his "plus" column I place That Cold Day in the Park (Altman's 2nd film), an off-beat, forgotten masterpiece of loneliness and sexual obsession.

Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen

Michael Burns as The Boy

Academy-Award-winning actress Sandy Dennis, on the downside of an unsustainable fire-hot popularity that began with 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars as Frances Austen, a wealthy, 32-year-old woman living alone in a spacious apartment in Vancouver, Canada. Prim and cripplingly repressed, Frances lives a life of formal ritual, surrounded by friends who are at least 20 years her senior (they, like her staid apartment, appear to have been inherited from her dead mother).

One rainy afternoon she spies a young man sitting alone on a park bench and invites him in to get dry. The blankly cherubic 19-year-old (Michael Burns) speaks not a word, but allows the solicitous woman to bathe, feed, and eventually house him. The boy's silent passivity (he's never named) and apparent lack of friends or family enable Frances to project a great deal of her own loneliness onto his situation, awakening in her an acute awareness of her long-repressed desires. Before long, Frances' initial maternal concern gives way to darker obsessions as the boy comes to symbolize a last-chance grasp at life.

One of Frances' many joyless, ritualized social commitments

Something about the boy sitting alone in the rain touches Frances. A repressed woman who, up until this point, has given the impression of being rather icy and removed.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Movies about older women and kept men date back at least as far as 1950s Sunset Blvd. Movies about old coots chasing after young women date back even further and are often presented as joyous romps (There's a Girl in My Soup - 1970) or timeless romances (think of pretty much every early Audrey Hepburn movie), but rarely is the creep factor explored because these movies are written by, for, and intended to flatter the ego of men. But in a world where women are seen as girls, girlfriends, or wives, older single women tend to be depicted as the stuff of horror. 

Another thing I've noticed is that, whether due to gender-role preconceptions which ignore the fairly common strong-woman / weak-male dynamic (seen in non-stop parade on reality TV court shows), or these narrative's close association with homosexual authors - Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and  Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - films on the subject have always seemed to court a gay sensibility. Which is to say, the female characters in these stories could be replaced by a male without significantly altering the substance or themes of the narrative.

Sex Object
A rarity in most American films - Robert Altman asks us to share the feminine gaze.

Due to the predominance of male directors, writers, and cinematographers, movie audiences have grown quite used to the fact that films almost always represent the subjective male gaze. When on those rare occasions that gaze turns feminine and it's the male torso upon whom the leering close-ups are trained, audiences (particularly American males) are often made uncomfortable and don't quite know what to do with themselves. Film critics traditionally channel such discomfort into dismissing these films as being homoerotic or gay in their sensibility (the tact taken by critics reviewing the inarguably lousy but essentially harmless Sex and the City movies). Otherwise, they invoke a curious double-standard and label the male nudity as "gratuitous" or humiliating for the actor. At no time is the thought ever entertained that, for once, a film's gaze is intended to reflect the point of view of a female.

One of the strengths of That Cold Day in the Park is how it commits to reinforcing the gaze of its female protagonist and uses any ensuing audience discomfort to its atmospheric advantage. In a refreshing change of pace for an Altman film, a male (Michael Burns) spends most of the movie in various states of fetishized undress; the camera lingering over his bareness in a way usually reserved for comely starlets. From a narrative standpoint, all this suggested nudity underscores the character's vulnerability; but psychologically speaking, I like the way something so simple has the power to mess with so many minds. Men in movies are traditionally heroes and propel the plot. A great many, I'm afraid, are made uncomfortable when a male character is presented as not only passive, but subject to the whims of a woman.

Michael Burns, giving Joe Dallesandro a run for his money in the "passive, objectified male" sweepstakes

PERFORMANCES

Few actresses are as appealingly quirky as the late Sandy Dennis. Her performances are full of nervous mannerisms, eccentric tics, and vocal hiccups that you either love her for or else she annoys the hell out of you. I fall into the former category. In That Cold Day in the Park, Dennis has a role in which her trademark idiosyncrasies work toward defining an emotionally needy character stunted by a disturbing social awkwardness. I can't say her character is exactly likable (creepy is more the word) but Dennis's performance is touching and moves one to empathy.

Frances: "I remember my mother never stopped saying how lonely she was after my father died. 
She kept talking on and on, always reminding me how little company I was for her."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I love it when directors do more than just use the camera to record the action. Altman makes great use of the concealment/distortion value of shadows, glass, mirrors, and reflective surfaces. A good deal of the sense of unease this film elicits is due to the way Altman bisects and divides the screen, keeping the characters in their own separate worlds even when they share the same space.

Isolated Worlds
Although lonely herself, Frances is unable to return the affection an equally
lonely suitor (Edward Greenhalgh) extends to her.

Barriers
An attempt to reach out.

Separated
Frances holds one-sided conversations with the boy who cannot (will not?) speak.

Window Blinds or Iron Bars?
The characters in That Cold Day in the Park live in various self-imposed prisons.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I first saw That Cold Day in the Park back in the early 70s on a now-defunct San Francisco TV channel: KEMO-TV Channel 20 - which had this great late-night program called "The Adults Only Movie."  The movies were mostly foreign or art films (I must have been the only kid in my class who knew who Catherine Spaak was), but what 13-year-old could resist a program with a title like that? The version of That Cold Day In The Park I saw was heavily edited and viewed on a tiny black and white TV set in my bedroom, but it nevertheless blew me away and I sought it out many years later at revival theaters. Then, the film mostly impressed me as a kinky suspense thriller with a very powerful final act (and the male nudity didn't hurt, either). But over the years I have come to grow fonder of it as a labyrinthine character piece and dark treatise on loneliness. The shift of tone from somber drama to something unanticipatedly perverse is like a slow descent into madness.

Despite some cinematic evidence to the contrary, I really don't believe Robert Altman was a misogynist. His films with male leads have an off-putting thread of misanthropy and cruelty running through them, yet his films with female leads (The Company, 3 Women, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) are infinitely gentler and markedly more humane. That Cold Day in the Park is almost delicate in the way it handles the Sandy Dennis character when it could have easily made her into some kind of a gynophobia-inspired monster.

OK, so the "grasping female" imagery doesn't support my argument, but is this a cool ad, or what?

I think in his own twisted way, Altman liked women a good deal more than men.


BONUS MATERIAL
Excellent review of the Richard Miles' 1965 novel at Pretty Sinister Books 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011