The time: postwar (most critics say late 1940s but if there was a specific time referenced, I missed it). The place: an army base in Georgia. Marlon Brando (at right) is a major, stoic but tightly strung, who teaches classes on leadership. His wife (Elizabeth Taylor) is a sexy and gregarious bombshell who loves to ride horses. She gets nothing from her husband in the bedroom so she is indulging in an affair with another officer (Brian Keith) whose wife (Julie Harris) is still recovering from a nervous breakdown during which she cut off her nipples with garden shears. (No, it's not based on Tennessee Williams but Carson McCullers.) Her horse is named Firebird and its groom is the broodily handsome and silent army private Robert Forster. If you have any doubts about where this is going, here is an early exchange between Brando and Taylor. Brando: "Firebird is a horse"; Taylor, contemptuously, in her braying and snarling mode, "Firebird is a stallion!" Forester becomes an obsessive stalker of Taylor, sneaking into her bedroom at night and going through her underthings. He also has a tendency to stroll through the nearby woods naked, and to sunbathe naked, and to ride horses naked. Brando's eye is caught by Forster, and he thinks that Forster is flirting with him. Brando is certainly not ready to accept his homosexual feelings, though he does occasionally primp in front of a mirror when no one else is around, and cries for no reason—though being Brando, he does all this in a fairly butch fashion. One day Brando takes Firebird for a ride, but he loses control of the horse, falls off, breaks down and winds up beating the horse with a whip. The naked Forester takes the horse back to its stall, and that night at a party, Taylor whips Brando in the face. Things do not go uphill from here.
The Hollywood Production Code, which prohibited the portrayal of any number of acts that could be seen as immoral or perverse, was breaking down at this point in the 1960s, due in large part to movies like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which starred Taylor). Queerness was still seen as something unhealthy and couldn't really be presented explicitly in a mainstream film, but anyone who couldn't see it barely beneath the surface here, as it was in the 1941 novel, wasn't paying attention or had lived a very sheltered life. This may seem like an outdated story now, but even in 2026, people are still pressured to hide their queerness; if this were made today, it would surely be much more explicit in tone, imagery and incident but the fear, self-loathing, and ridicule of others would still be sadly relevant.
Having said that, it was difficult to watch this today and not feel it was old-fashioned, bordering on camp. It takes a while to get used to Brando in a closeted mode, and he gives a very mannered, performative performance (if that makes sense), but that makes some sense as the character would have been aware all the time that he was performing straight masculinity. I ended up thinking that he gave a good portrayal of a man who was constantly uncomfortable in his own skin. Taylor is a bit over the top, coming off occasionally like a somewhat less angry Martha from Who's Afraid, but nothing about the part seems to call for underplaying. Brian Keith is very good, coming off as mostly confused but well-intentioned about both his wife and his mistress. Julie Harris is vague in a vaguely defined role. Forester, pictured at left, barely gives a performance at all; he just stands around looking sexy and detached, but also a little confused about his feelings for Taylor. He's more a plot device than a character. I'm not even sure if he has any dialogue; for a while, I thought maybe his character was imaginary and that only Brando could see him. There are two other characters who are coded as gay/queer. Zorro David plays Julie Harris' effeminate Filipino houseboy who tries to protect her from reality, and is the source of the title, a reference to a peacock's eye in a painting. It's interesting that Keith seems to resent his presence, but after he leaves, Keith wishes he would come back. There's also a very minor character, Capt. Weincheck, a friend to Harris, who is seen as, if not quite a sissy, still too gentle and sensitive for military life. Brando gets a good line that gets to the core of his problem, to which he gives a tightly controlled and effective reading: "Any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normality is wrong and should not be allowed to bring happiness." I saw a full-color version of this movie, but it was originally released (in theaters and recently on DVD) in an amber-tinted version that just seems wrong-headed. [TCM]
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