evanston_dad

"Reflections in a Golden Eye" really isn't a great movie. It's overwrought, unevenly acted, and downright squirelly at times. But there's something fascinating about it, and the subject matter is lurid enough, not to mention ahead of its time, to generate a kind of prurient interest in the movie despite its flaws.

Elizabeth Taylor does another version of her Southern ball buster routine while a young and creepy Robert Forster lurks around spying on her while she's sleeping when he's not riding horses buck ass naked through the woods. Marlon Brando gets the meatiest role to play, a repressed gay Army officer whose insecurity about his manhood causes him to unravel. Julie Harris gives probably the film's best performance as a troubled and neglected Army wife.

All of this is pitched to the second balcony and frequently is laughable -- this would be a great movie to make fun of with a group of friends. But it's all also legitimately compelling.

Grade: A-

I expected one of those yuck yucky, visually ugly comedies popular in the 1960s, and instead got a quite good movie that felt even a bit trailblazing for the frank way it treats the subject of divorce in particular but a more general American suburban malaise in general.

The counterculture was about to take over the movie business in full force, and while "Divorce American Style" is by no means a counterculture movie, it has hints of being one. It was still pretty popular in 1967 to try to convince everyone that they should be thrilled with the post-WWII American dream and there was something wrong with you if you weren't. So for such a mainstream movie with such mainstream actors to suggest otherwise was pretty bold.

I loved the segments sprinkled throughout the film that were choreographed almost like musical numbers, like the one where Dick van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds are getting ready for bed and passively aggressively trying to annoy each other, or one where a bunch of parents and step-parents arrive to pick up a bunch of kids and have to figure out who goes with whom. Van Dyke is extremely winning. Reynolds is good too, but this was the 60s, so of course this story is told from the male point of view and van Dyke's is the character we're asked to sympathize with the most.

Norman Lear and Robert Kaufman received an Oscar nomination for the film's original screenplay.

Grade: A-

Betty Hutton must not have been available when studio execs decided to make a screen adaptation of the Broadway musical, so they hired Debbie Reynolds instead and instructed her to act just like her.

Reynolds can be adorable, and what's more, she can be slyly and subtly funny. But in this, she overacts so grotesquely that she made me physically uncomfortable. The only reason she doesn't come off worse is that everyone around her is asked to pitch their performances to the same extreme level. The result is two and a half hours of mugging and grimacing and screeching, all to the service of a thin plot and weak songs.

There's one scene in this I really enjoyed, a dance number set in an Old West saloon. The rest I sat through to see what was so great about it that it earned six Oscar nominations in 1964. It played third string that year to two other enormously popular musicals, "My Fair Lady" and "Mary Poppins," but still managed to snag nominations for Best Actress (Reynolds -- never underestimate the Academy's ability to recognize career achievement by nominating someone for their worst performance), Best Color Art Direction, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Costume Design, Best Scoring Adaptation, and Best Sound.

Grade: D+