On a U.S. Army post circa 1948, a major who is an impotent, latent homosexual is married to an infantile birdbrain who never misses an opportunity to ridicule his masculine failings. He displaces his hostility by brutally flogging her horse and she retaliates by humiliating him before a houseful of guests, repeatedly slashing him across the face with her riding crop. She is also committing adultery with the officer next door, who's wife cut off her nipples with garden shears after the death of her baby. She has sought solace in the ministrations of her effeminate houseboy. The sixth character, coveted by the major, is a darkly handsome noncom, a voyeur and lingerie-fondler, given to nightly appearances as a peeping tom in the birdbrain's bedroom and daily sessions of horseback riding in the middle of the woods stark naked.
There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” So begins John Huston’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Overflowing with gothic atmosphere, the film circles around the stoic, marble-mouthed Major Weldon Penderton, a character rigorously embodied by Marlon Brando. He silently pines for a mysterious young soldier (Robert Forster, in his first screen role) who has secrets of his own, like a fondness for naked horseback riding and a peculiar fixation with the negligee of the Major’s wife, Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor, in a performance so tempestuous it rivals her turn in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Less inhibited is the neighbors’ houseboy Anacleto, a fey, scene-stealing esthete who refuses to conform to the strictures of the military environment that surrounds him, making him something of a rare bird in this stirring examination of repressed longings and their unbearable weight.