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Perhaps only trivia fans and obsessive readers of film reviews remember how widespread was the journalistic sport, post-Cleopatra and post-Mutiny on the Bounty, of making each new Elizabeth Taylor or Marlon Brando picture the pretext for rehearsing these performers' histories of acting up instead of acting, and sending production costs through the ceiling because of the delays this occasioned. Reflections in a Golden Eye had both Brando and Taylor in its cast, and this, plus the psychosexual multifariousness of the Carson McCullers characters, provided plenty of cue for outrage over the state of Hollywood at the dawn of the New Permissiveness.
1967 audiences were agreeably scandalized by some of the first nudity to reach the American screen in decades (a couple of fleeting tushie views - Robert Forster legit, Liz Taylor dubbed), but they tended to be mystified by the characters' bizarre behavior and by the washed-out, golden-toned Technicolor that, however admirably it caught McCullers' suffocated Southern Gothicism, didn't look like any movie "in color" they'd ever seen. (Wamers-7 Arts was quick to agree on that point, and soon replaced Huston's "golden" version with regular, fully-saturated prints.)
"There is a fort in the American South where, some years ago, a murder was committed." Huston's movie uses the first line of McCullers' novel as a gold-on-gold epigraph; both narratives have one anxiously analyzing...