Movie Review: Nevada Smith (1966)

An epic western, Nevada Smith is a grand tale of revenge and coming-of-age.

In the 1890s, outlaws Fitch (Karl Malden), Coe (Martin Landau), and Bowdre (Arthur Kennedy) murder the parents of Max Sand (Steve McQueen), a half-breed young man. Despite no education and no experience in killing, Max vows revenge and sets off to find the killers. He receives gun training from traveling gunsmith Jonas Cord (Brian Keith), then Kiowa woman Neesa (Janet Margolin) helps him identify Coe, a professional gambler and expert knifeman.

Max then locates Bowdre incarcerated in Louisiana, and stages a robbery to join him in a brutal prison located deep in the swamp lands. Max befriends Bowdre and plots an escape, using local woman Pilar (Suzanne Pleshette) to provide them with a boat. Max's final challenge is to find Fitch, now the leader of a large outlaw gang. He adopts the name Nevada Smith to mask his growing reputation and gain Fitch's trust.

Directed by Henry Hathaway and written by John Michael Hayes, Nevada Smith is inspired by a character in Harold Robbins' 1961 book The Carpetbaggers. This is a richly textured western with a story of personal growth unfolding over multiple chapters. Visually beautiful, the engrossing story of revenge fuelled by blind fury easily sustains 131 minutes of screen time.

Steve McQueen at 35 years old does struggle to convey a young Max Sand in the early scenes, and often appears more goofy than naive. As the narrative progresses, Hathaway could have helped by sharpening the definition of the passing years. Regardless, McQueen improves towards the latter segments, and his cool persona is fully meshed with his character for the final confrontation with Fitch.

Along the way, the Louisiana prison sequence is almost a film within a film and introduces a unique setting to the western milieu. Max's long detour to a brutal prison camp and the dangerous surrounding swamps carries a singular and memorable intensity.

At the metaphysical level, Max starts out as an empty vessel knowing only his family then pure evil and hatred. His arc introduces him to a good man in Jonas Cord, two good women from each side of his heritage in Neesa and Pilar, the meaning of a nurturing community with the Kiowa tribe, and finally God, through an encounter with Father Zaccardi (Raf Vallone). By the time Max is ready to close the chapter of his parents' death, he is mature, educated and much wiser to the world and his potential within it.

Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Arthur Kennedy, Brian Keith and Vallone offer robust support without stealing any scenes. Suzanne Pleshette does leave a haunting impression, her Pilar a prisoner without a crime sacrificing everything for a man while still oblivious to his potential for exploitativeness. Nevada Smith searches for a violent brand justice, but stumbles upon the compassion and humanity required for a different future.

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Movie Review: Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967)

A train wreck of weird characters behaving badly, Reflections In A Golden Eye goes off the rails early and never recovers. The story of suppressed homosexuality on an army base teaming with lust and madness spirals into self-imposed chaos.

Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) commands a US army base in the south. He is stiff, unhappy, suppressed and not interested in sleeping with his wife Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor). She enjoys riding her horse Firebird, and finds sexual satisfaction with willing neighbour Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon (Brian Keith). Langdon's wife Alison (Julie Harris) is deeply depressed following the death three years earlier of her newborn child. Alison is only happy in the company of the effeminate and extroverted Filipino houseboy Anacleto (Zorro David).

Also on the base, Private Williams (Robert Forster) looks after cleaning the horses and stables, and has the habit of riding horses in the nude. Penderton starts to get attracted to Williams, who in turn starts stalking the the Penderton household, and invading Leonora's room while she sleeps. With Alison's condition worsening, Penderton growing ever more enamoured with Williams, and Williams developing the unhealthy habit of sniffing Leonora's underwear, the boiling emotions finally erupt.

Based on a 1941 novel by Carson McCullers, Reflections In A Golden Eye is just too close to an unintended comedy. Five of the main characters belong in a mental asylum, rather than a military base, and without a sensible core to hold the film together, it resembles more of a farce than a drama.

Penderton is dour, preens at himself in the mirror, mumbles his incomprehensible military teachings to the bewilderment of his students, gets into a fight with a horse, and stalks his men around the base. Leonora is wild-eyed, over-sexed, and happy to humiliate her man, including whipping him across the face at a swanky party. Alison is deep into depression, operating at the edge of reason, while Williams is a voyeur, an intruder, a lingerie-sniffer, and rides horses while naked. And finally there is Anacleto, floating, dancing, singing and smiling for his own entertainment in an astonishing display of flightiness.

The performances match the characters in a theatrical display of exaggeration. Brando mutters, rambles and stares, while Taylor sticks either her rear end or her cleavage in Brando's face at every opportunity. Harris mostly just looks into the non-existent distance, and Forster, in his debut, wears a single fixed look of anguish and hardly says anything. Zorro David, in his first and mercifully last movie appearance, is in a world on his own, doing something that on a bad day may resemble acting, but even that is debatable. Brian Keith is left with the only semi-rational character, and he is naturally overwhelmed.

It is all supposed to represent suppression and lust, but director John Huston never finds the fine line where normal behaviour is strained by unresolved internal conflict, and settles instead for a large serving of outright battiness. Huston adds to the air of melodrama-run-amok by tinting the movie with a golden hue, creating a gold-and-black film with just the odd object per frame maintaining its colour. According to the peerless Anacleto, it's all supposed to represent the reflection of what a golden peacock's eye can see, but the effect is that of basic nausea. After the film bombed, normal colour was restored to later prints, but the film's awfulness is most appreciated with the original pee-coloured vision.

Forget the military base: Reflections In A Golden Eye is a certifiable cuckoo's nest.

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