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The roundelay of desire suits the human condition's tragicomedy, a wilted Army wife gives it a name, "grotesque." Two homes in a Southern fort, each with its own blur of masculinity and femininity. The Major pumps iron and lectures on warfare, a stiff husk housing knotted urges, one of Marlon Brando's most extraordinary incarnations. He's married to the robust belle (Elizabeth Taylor) who raises ball-busting to an art form: "Son, have you ever been collared and dragged out into the street and thrashed by a naked woman?" She romps openly with the Colonel (Brian Keith), whose wife (Julie Harris) seeks refuge in self-mutilation and watercolor aestheticism. The free integers are the houseboy (Zorro David) whose camp fluidity taunts the regimented machismo all around him, and the young soldier (Robert Forster) given to lingerie-sniffing and forest rides, "bareback to bare ass." John Huston has the specimens under intense scrutiny, their cages painted a muggy sepia to mirror a neurotic retina. (The connection to the color experiments of Moby Dick is apt, this is Billy Budd by way of Carson McCullers.) Suppression and hysteria and "economy of force," Brando stone-faced with cold cream before a mirror (cf. Death in Venice) and a teary, grimacing mask after lashing a runaway stallion. Training field, boxing ring, stables, woods, mysterious zones of order and turmoil. "Any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normality is wrong," the Major tells himself while cherishing the soldier's discarded candy wrapper like a clandestine love letter. The sustained gravity of the camera gives way to the panning frenzy of the climax, as befits a crossroads of studio classicism and dissonant modernism. Steiger in Flynn's The Sergeant might be an immediate response, and there are consequences for Bergman (The Passion of Anna) and Bertolucci (The Conformist). Cinematography by Aldo Tonti.
--- Fernando F. Croce |