Captain Penderton, predictably, has no sympathy for Captain Weincheck and does his best to oust him from the service. As a veteran of Broadway and Hollywood, Brando was familiar with the self-hatred that made closeted homosexuals the most cunning and punitive regulators of one another. Thus, another probable reason for cutting the scene of flagrant sadism toward the kitten was to further an empathetic portrait of a homosexual whom audiences, straight and gay, might otherwise be inclined to spurn. The Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York’s Greenwich Village (violent protests by gay men and women against decades of vilification and abuse) and the first Gay Pride marches were still years away. The entertainment and media industries, in which many homosexuals had careers, were notoriously resistant to overt treatments like Reflections in a Golden Eye.
Out of character with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Reflections. Loomis Dean/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Brando had excoriated Time magazine in 1963 on the Today Show for its consistently hostile reviews of playwright Tennessee Williams. Brando read aloud from Time critiques of Williams, calling attention to the anal rhetoric and physical slurs so obviously misplaced in a reputable journal. The use of terms such as manure and ineffable sashay of self-pity, as well as the review’s overall charge that Williams “has hallucinated a vast but specious pageant of depravity in which fantasies of incest, cannibalism, murder, rape, sodomy, and drug addiction constitute the canon of reality,” were means both subtle and explicit of dismissing Williams and his work as homosexual and perverse. Time’s message was clear: Williams and his ilk have no place in an American dramatic tradition. “All the criticisms are like that,” Brando noted, with one stunning exception—a celebration of Williams that somehow penetrated the official “Time opinion.” Brando closed by reading aloud from the review that called Williams “a consummate master of the theatre . . . the greatest U.S. playwright since Eugene O’Neill,” comparing his monologues to those of Shakespeare.37
In character with John Huston on the set of Reflections. Warner Bros./Photofest.
Well before Stonewall, with typical courage, Brando spoke out against a major magazine’s homophobic coverage. It took even more courage to accept the role of Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye, intended for Elizabeth Taylor’s friend Montgomery Clift, whose fragile health had initiated the search for a replacement well before his death on July 23, 1966. Clift’s bisexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, his death from heart failure the result of years of alcohol and drug abuse. Brando had always been the first choice to replace Clift, but he was expensive, and during the protracted negotiations, Reflections producer Ray Stark reported to Taylor in an August 16, 1966, letter that he had pursued all the plausible alternatives. But no one of the caliber needed to star opposite her in a challenging role was willing to risk playing a closeted homosexual. Indeed, the homosexual content of Reflections in a Golden Eye was so disturbing to the Motion Picture Association of America that they avoided it almost completely (or wouldn’t admit they noticed it because it might mean they were seeing something that wasn’t there) in a 1964 letter about the script, warning only about stand-alone nude scenes of Taylor (Leonora Penderton) in her living room and Robert Forster (Private Williams) in the woods. Stark’s letter testified to Brando’s persisting stature. Explaining why Taylor had to be prepared to accept a smaller cut of the proceeds, Stark noted that Brando was asking for a million in salary plus seven and a half percent of the film’s gross. Stark reminded Taylor that she had promised, once Clift was unavailable, to make almost any monetary sacrifice to get Brando, and also that Brando was at the top of John Huston’s list of actors to play Penderton.38 Huston was the prestigious director of The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and many other major films.
As Stark and Huston expected, Brando embraced Penderton’s pain, making him absorbing, even attractive despite his finickiness and irritability, thus preserving his credibility as a beautiful woman’s husband. He is cold but has moments of charm, his Southern accent and manner assisting the flourish of a witticism or smile. In scenes when Penderton watches Private Williams surreptitiously—doing drills with the battalion, riding, or sunbathing nude—his face assumes a childish plushness, gazing in rapt wonder at the young man’s physical freedom. Williams’s natural power threatens Penderton even as he covets it. He sees the same thing in his wife’s precious racehorse, Firebird, which is why he is so determined to thwart the animal. Taking the horse out alone on the sly, knowing his wife will be preoccupied with preparations for her party, he treats it like a live grenade, until he is astride. He lets the horse run free so he can pull it up sadistically, until the animal takes off wildly as he clings to the reins, resulting in Penderton’s face being lacerated by tree branches. When the horse finally stops, he beats it viciously with a tree switch—the one time his desire and envy is externalized in aggression. The act is twisted and brutal, painful to watch, as the officer collapses sobbing from self-pity and guilt.
This is among Brando’s great moments on film, as he conveys simultaneously the character’s infantile narcissism, boyish cruelty, and homoeroticism. The scene culminates with the miraculous appearance of Private Williams, naked, stepping over the major’s prone body to lead the traumatized horse away. This is as close as Penderton gets to sexual release, and he luxuriates in his own humiliation. The scene is immediately echoed in the sadomasochistic exchange between wife and husband. Discovering what he has done to Firebird, Leonora lashes her husband across his bandaged face with a riding crop, in front of all the military brass assembled at their house party. Penderton at this moment is a type of Christ, as he stares motionless, his eyes gentle, surrendering to her punishment. The film bears witness to his status as a symbol of collective suffering, in the many reflections of his image: in his bedroom mirror flexing his biceps; in the hallway mirror miming dialogues when he anticipates promotion to general; and, most disturbing, in the bathroom mirror first delicately applying his wife’s face cream and then smearing it heavily over his eyelids, distorting his appearance. The scene is a tribute to Brando’s bravery and sympathy, as he reveals Penderton reaching feminized depths that he must immediately reject as monstrous.
Penderton never loses his dignity, despite the magnitude of what he represses. A bit of a pedant lecturing to cadets on Clausewitz, the theorist of war whom he worships, he remains a figure of authority. We are reminded here of Brando’s conversance with military schools. During his two years at Shattuck, he was exposed to every aspect of officer training and education: drills with firearms, competitive sports, a traditional curriculum heavy in battle tactics as well as history and Shakespeare.39 At Shattuck, he would have met adults like Penderton, and boys on their way to becoming him, men who luxuriated in the world of men and learned to hide their homoeroticism in order to thrive there.
Penderton comes to life describing the simple pleasures of the enlisted man. “It’s rough and it’s coarse perhaps but it’s also clean, it’s clean as a rifle. There’s no speck of dust inside or out, and it’s immaculate in its hard young fitness. . . . They’re seldom out of one another’s sight, they eat and they train and they shower and play jokes and go to the brothel together, and they sleep side by side. . . . There are friendships formed that are stronger . . . than the fear of death. And they’re . . . never lonely, never lonely. And sometimes I envy them.” By the fireplace, pipe in hand, Penderton outlines the ideal of masculinity liberated from female civilization and intrigue, symbolized by his wife listening mystified in a provocatively low-cut dress. In making Penderton the spokesman for the healthy male norm, the film confirms not only the conventionality of his deepest emotions but also the latent homoeroticism of the norm.
Moreover, it is critical that during a previous speech in the same scene, Penderton has for the first time opposed orthodoxy, paraphrasing his wife’s lover, Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith): “Any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normality is wrong, and should not be a
llowed to bring happiness. . . . It’s better because it’s morally honorable for the square peg to keep scraping about in a round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox one that would fit it.” Asked if he agrees, Penderton replies, “No, I don’t.” Because it precedes his idealization of barracks life, Penderton’s implicitly erotic rhetoric of pegs and holes exposes a utopian dimension of Reflections in a Golden Eye—the film’s recognition of how integral Penderton’s impulses are to standard masculinity.
Audiences were unprepared for such insights as Tennessee Williams demonstrated in his introduction to a New Directions reprint of McCullers’s novella, published in 1971, four years after the film version’s release. Williams takes a brash stand when it comes to aesthetics, declaring McCullers’s fiction exemplary modern art, on par with Picasso’s Guernica, chiding the philistines who marginalize her work as merely “Gothic.” But he censors himself on sexuality: he never mentions Huston’s film, starring the “greatest living actor” (as Williams categorized Brando in 1975), avoiding the homosexual content of fiction and film.40 Like so much of Brando’s work in the sixties, Reflections in a Golden Eye was ahead of its time. As Brando’s Today Show critique of slurs against Williams confirmed, the playwright’s gay identity was common knowledge. But Williams’s career would hardly have benefited from saying so outright.
Between his two speeches, Penderton strides to the mantel to grab a pipe and knocks over “Rufus,” his wife’s favorite figurine, which is of a stereotyped black servant with a big, ingratiating smile. This is no accident. The breaking of this image of black servility is consistent with the major’s rejection of moral honor on behalf of the square peg. The world of Reflections in a Golden Eye is rife with racism, homophobia, and misogyny, embraced, as the film portrays them, by shuffling black soldiers, “exotic” servants, and awkward homosexuals. Penderton denigrates Weincheck; Langdon torments Anacleto, the Filipino houseboy; and Leonora ridicules homosexuals. The scene in which Leonora and her black servant snicker over a joke about “two little queers,” audible to her husband in his nearby study, is typical. Penderton’s enlightened challenge to homophobic and racist conventions in the fireplace scene should not be overlooked, despite its qualification by the ending, when Penderton kills Private Williams after discovering him in his wife’s bedroom fondling her clothes. The scene anticipates a restoration of normative heterosexuality: Penderton will assume the guise of a husband in his castle defending his wife, reenter the closet, and be promoted to general. Still, what film audiences know matters: that Penderton murders Williams in a rage over the young man’s preference for Penderton’s wife over him. And this is enough to make Reflections in a Golden Eye a film that actually pointed the way toward political change rather than following in its wake.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is possible to miss the courageousness of Brando’s willingness to play a homosexual character with sympathetic understanding in 1966. Brando’s acting style would have him pursuing the depths of such a character. Given his respect for the director, script, and costars, he knew they would prompt him to it. Some of the scenes were almost unbearable—Penderton with the horse, Penderton and Leonora home alone engaged in ferocious marital combat, Leonora lashing her husband’s face with the riding crop before party guests. The quality of the acting and directing keeps them within the pale of common human feeling. The movie remains compellingly painful for contemporary viewers because the characters are not stereotypes, and their suffering is all too real.
Brando’s groundbreaking work in the sixties influenced others in film. Robert De Niro, for instance, was indebted to Brando’s mirror scenes in Reflections in a Golden Eye for Taxi Driver’s (1976) tour-de-force mirror speech (“You talkin’ to me?”).41 Future director Francis Ford Coppola worked briefly as a screenwriter on Reflections.42 Moreover, despite its controversial subject, most contemporary reviews celebrated the acting. Citing Brando beating the horse and lecturing a class of soldiers, film critic Roger Ebert announced: “In this scene and others Brando regains the peak of his magnificent talent,” while the New York Post proclaimed: “Brando has never been greater. His solitary frenzy of fear, relief and anger, brought about by a horse running away with him, is awesome in its approach to insanity.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner added further praise: “Seldom, if ever, has a Hollywood film displayed such fidelity to a literary work of art”; “recalls his early winning days at the start of his career,” his speech on “A life among men . . . a highlight.”43
The positive reviews were especially noteworthy, given what seemed the deliberate suppression by distributors of a film with sensitive themes. Roger Ebert found it “fishy” the way the film “crept into town so silently.” After all, here was a film “with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, no less, and the director was that great man himself, John Huston. . . . Was the movie so wretchedly bad that Warner Bros. decided to keep it a secret?” Ray Stark wrote to John Huston, reporting brisk sales for the film’s first week. Still, Stark expressed suspicion about the timing of the film’s release, with minimal publicity and no premiere, during a week that contained both the Jewish High Holidays and the World Series.44 The same would be true of Brando’s next major film, Burn! (1969) or Queimada!, in Portuguese, his own favorite of the sixties.
REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA, BURN!
Burn! was in many ways typical of the sixties for Brando. He had a major director in Gillo Pontecorvo, and experienced film people in cinematographer Marcello Gatti (The Battle of Algiers) plus producer Alberto Grimaldi and composer Ennio Morricone, who had worked together on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Brando had accepted the project because he admired Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers for its realistic portrait of guerrilla fighters triumphing over an imperial-colonial power. He believed in Burn! and its potential for illuminating global problems of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Brando understood the film’s history as directly relevant to the American race struggle. He sought out Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver to discuss their revolutionary objectives—partly, he told them, so that he might grasp firsthand contemporary aspirations that recalled those of the black rebels in Burn!45
Burn! was a highly politicized enterprise from the start. Developed from a story by Pontecorvo and writer Franco Solinas, it was inspired by an incident in the 1520s when the Spanish burned an entire Caribbean island to quell a revolt by indigenous workers. Replacing the workers with African slaves, the Spanish and their descendants spent the next three hundred years exploiting the island’s resources. The film explores the nineteenth-century aftermath of these violent beginnings from the perspective of a British agent, Brando’s Sir William Walker, hired to instigate a rebellion against Portuguese rule—changed from Spanish to avoid a boycott of the film by Franco’s regime—so Britain can secure a foothold in sugar-cane production. Walker sails to the island of Queimada, intending to cultivate a black resistance leader named Santiago, but he arrives just in time to witness his execution. His effort to find a substitute with enough dignity and rage to head a revolt is helped along by Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), a mulatto businessman eager to foster any opposition to Portuguese rule. The plot of Burn! thus comes to center on the transformation of José Dolores (Evaristo Marquez), a simple black porter, into a revolutionary hero.
Burn! is divided into two parts: The first ends when Dolores’s militia disarms after triumphing over the Portuguese. An indigenous government headed by Sanchez is installed and controlled by foreign investors, and Walker leaves the country. The story resumes ten years later in the late 1840s, when Walker returns to Queimada as emissary for the Antilles Royal Sugar Company to challenge a native uprising that threatens to topple both the Sanchez government and its neocolonial partners. This time, instead of stirring up a rebellion to establish British commercial interests, Walker’s mission is to put one down in order to salvage them. The new 1848 rebellion, which is likened to European popular revolts of the era, is led by Dolor
es, who has become a revolutionary. Summoned as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein to contain the monster he has created, Walker proceeds to delineate in strategy sessions with Sanchez and his generals what their forces are up against. Dolores is a classic guerrilla fighter: His small bands in the mountainous Sierra depend on destitute villagers and persevere despite being vastly outnumbered. Guerrillas, Walker explains, are formidable opponents because they “have nothing to lose and fight for an idea.” Dolores himself says laboring for foreign investors and their local lackeys is equivalent to slavery. He declares that freedom cannot be given; it must be seized. Subsequent scenes of Dolores’s army subjected to every conceivable form of warfare—swords, cannon, guns, fire, and dogs—align Queimada’s revolutionaries with freedom fighters across the centuries, including nineteenth-century American slaves. While Dolores dies at the end, his martyrdom foreshadows the inevitable demise of white domination in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
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