Welcome to the world of Southern Gothic, a genre in its own right as director John Huston adapts Carson McCullers novel.
The breakdown of the Hays Code allowed this picture to be released in the mid 1960s with a daring depiction of sexual mores and sexuality in an army base along with some nudity and repressed emotions.
The film deals with a group of grotesques in a Southern army base after the second world war. Elizabeth Taylor plays the wife, Leonora of Major Penderton (Marlon Brando) who loves her horse, Firebird. She is having an affair with her neighbour Lt Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith.) There is a touch of the Cat on the Hot Tin Roof about Taylor's character, very much a spoilt rich girl on heat.
A more subtle but also visceral performance is given by Brando. He is left embarrassed by his wife's antics, in awe with army life and culture. Just look at the way he works out with weights, gives the lecture to a class and talks about the army at a dinner party. Yet Penderton is a repressed homosexual maybe why he is prepared to turn a blind eye to Leonora's infidelity.
Langdon's only solace is his time with Leonora, his own wife played by Julie Harris has had a traumatic breakdown resulting in self harm and he also has to deal with an effeminate Filipino houseboy who brings great comfort to his wife.
Robert Forster is the final piece in the jigsaw. His Private Williams cares for the horses in the army stables and has the habit of riding the horses naked in the fields. He becomes an object of Penderton's lust but Williams is also a creep himself. A voyeur who has a perverted desire for Leonora and sneaks into her bedroom and watches her.
Huston uses subtle use of light and visual tricks such as reflection in Private Williams golden eye to infuse the film with some artistic pretensions as well as various symbolisms.
It's a steamy, hothouse melodrama from the south, it imbues carnage and a tragic ending. Forster says few words in this film and his character has a dark edge, Brando despite a few heated argumentative scenes is more subtle here. He brings machismo and sympathy to a complicated character.
The film just feels too pretentious though, Taylor is kind of replaying A Cat in a Hot Tin Roof and would go on to play a more better known role a year later dealing with the breakdown of a twisted, bitter married couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
It is Brando that's makes the film watchable and he gives it a sort of quirkiness but I felt that this adaptation never gained full steam.
27 out of 38 found this helpful