Reflections in a Golden Eye - The TCM Version

Have you ever seen a movie where the whole thing might have been good, if not for that one little thing that just kept bugging you? Didn't you hate it when it happened? After all, bad movies are usually made up of bad ideas all the way through, and here's one that was maybe a lot of good ideas and one really bad one.

The edition of "Reflections in a Golden Eye" they show on TCM is just such a movie. Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, apparently two of the best actors of their generation, working with John Huston, apparently one of the best directors of his generation, working on a movie about... homosexuals in the army? Weird horse-obsessed women? An odd military recruit who likes to ride horses nude and breaks into Taylor's house to watch her while she sleeps?

Yes, obviously this movie could have gone wrong in so many ways. The amazing thing is that it seems to work. But I can't say whether it did work or not, because I was distracted by one thing throughout.

The color.

Apparently, John Huston's plan was to tint the movie gold, with one object in each scene retaining its normal color. However, test audiences got confused, and Technicolor technicians hated the idea, so it only showed in such a way in major cities while the rest of America got a normal-colored version. The normal-colored version is available on DVD, and maybe I should check it out. But on TCM, they show it with a gold filter in place (without any normal colors anywhere--it's gold or black). And damn, is that ever annoying.

It's rare that I'd side with the test audience and the technicians over the director, but they're right. It's a distraction. The movie is full of parts where people don't talk, but think; the idea is to get the audience to read what they're thinking from their faces. But you're not doing that at the quiet bits. You're thinking, "Why is it all gold, again?"

The filter is a terrible distraction. If it was necessary, there would be better ways to accomplish it. Why not shoot the movie with golden filters on the lights? That way, it looks like it's a part of the picture, and it's more difficult to get rid of it. Or, if the filter was absolutely necessary, why not make it a subtle golden color? Why not just make it lightly golden-hued, as opposed to the all-out attack of gold?

It's a terrible disappointment to see a movie get ruined like that. Here's a movie that sounds like an underrated classic, but you're always distracted. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.