"She cut off her nipples with garden shears," Elizabeth Taylor complains of Julie Harris, "and you call that normal'?" Almost all of John Huston's great films are careful, imaginative adaptations of underrated literary novels, but this version of Carson McCullers' decidedly bizarre book is one of his very infrequent disasters.
Marlon Brando plays an army officer so repulsed by wife Taylor's sexuality that he starts lusting after Robert Forster, a subordinate who is much given to riding army horses in the nude. In a cast of hand-picked loons with ridiculous accents, only Brian Keith, as Taylor's thuggish lover, suggests a human being, while Brando gives perhaps his worst ever screen performance, not counting Christopher Columbus: The Discovery.
