Titters started early and turned to fast and furious guffaws by the end of a recent screening of Reflections in a Golden Eye. Occasionally it was no more than a shift in attitudes, for example distraught clueless widower Lt. Col. Morris Langdon’s (Brian Keith) “keep myself fit, do my job, and serve my country.” More often the laughter was directed at the unintentional silliness, intentional simpering, awkward movement and mega-name miscasting of this 1967 film.

Maybe some demurral or other, but certainly no such derision, would greet an assertion that the clan Huston, Walter, John, Anjelica and Danny, is American cinema’s first family: three generations of acting, writing, directing for film and theater. The current five-week Museum of Modern Art celebration of “The Huston Family: 75 Years on Film” featured an opening appearance by Anjelica and continues to pack their two Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters beyond the hopes of many a wistful commercial release.

Alongside legendary, everyone’s-list titles, Reflections is so second-tier that one wonders where to place John Huston’s sardonic humor in this work and in his later remark that, with Fat City and The Man Who Would Be King, it was one of “only three good films [he had made] in the last decade.” The screenplay is by Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill, the latter the director’s longtime secretary who likely received credit even though, unacknowledged, Huston usually contributed heavily to his scripts. The film clings closely to its source, first titled “Army Post,” a poorly received 1940 Harper’s Bazaar serialization by Georgia wunderkind Carson Smith McCullers (1917-67). Twenty-two when she wrote this particular novella, and plagued by personal problems and atrocious lifelong ill-health, the authoress managed three shortish gems and a handful of stories that sparkle, in her Southern Gothic settings where typically A loves B and B is set on C, who lives only for A, i.e., love is not reciprocal.

Nowhere pinning itself to specifics, the screen version follows the writer’s unsettling timeless, hothouse quality. Neither the carnage already begun in Europe nor the year-of-filming American quagmire in Indochina, intrudes on “a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” (At Elizabeth Taylor’s insistence, shooting was actually done at Dino De Laurentiis’ studios near Rome.) More a gated community where enlisted men serve as officers’ chauffeurs, gardeners and stable boys -- one cocktail-party complaint is that polo is out -- this country-club affair is Albee-Cheever reset to Williams-Capote, where secrets, alcoholism, madness, nipple mutilation, adultery and homosexuality run beneath a regimented surface. (The married McCullers dedicated the slim 1940 hardcover edition to a female Swiss writer for whom she had an intense, ambiguous infatuation.)

The book occasioned telephone threats from the Klan, and it may have been the later era’s taboos (in the military, to boot) that caused five-times-married Huston’s ludicrous “hidden” symbolic treatment. D.H. Lawrencian black horses, for example, ridden buck naked and bareback by weirdo virgin Pvt. Ellgee Williams (a first screen appearance for Broadway’s Robert Forster), while army brat Leonora (Taylor) taunts the sexually and emotionally constipated husband she will publicly horsewhip, Maj. Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando), that her white Firebird is “a stallion, not a horse,” and too much for the likes of him.

Taylor had campaigned for her troubled friend Montgomery Clift as costar; with his death, the part was turned down by Richard Burton and Lee Marvin before Brando was cast. Gone to pudginess and unintelligible with Southern molasses soaking his mumble, Brando’s officer lectures students on manly control but privately ogles photos of muscled Greek statues, gobs on skin-rejuvenation cream, and saves the Baby Ruth wrapper tossed by Pvt. Williams, the assigned gardener for whom he represses lust. Her Maggie-the-Cat accent awfully lame, too, Taylor’s Leonora dallies with nice but dim Langdon, whose own neurasthenic wife Alison (Julie Harris) has kept to her room for three years after a thirty-three-hour labor, deformed birth, and gruesome self-defacement.

She amuses herself with androgynous Filipino houseboy Anacleto (Zorro David, a New York hairdresser in his début) and commiserates with military misfit and Jew, Capt. Murray Weincheck (Irvin Dugan), both men who appreciate culture, music, dance and, in the latter’s case, of course Proust. Near a framed anachronistic (post-novel 1948) Christina’s World, from her upstairs bedroom she sees Williams outside the Pendertons’ but cannot know that, in white tennis shoes, he conducts nightlong vigils at the sleeping woman’s bedside and sniffs her underthings.

Simmer such gumbo well, something is bound to explode. A lawyer could get a client off on the advertised but nevertheless surprising murder (and its stridently filmed aftermath). The film, on the other hand, cannot wriggle off the hook. Keith is solid, and, star of the Broadway adaptation of McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and Oscar-nominated for her début in the 1952 film version, the sensitive Harris is admirable. Brando’s martinet-except-in-his-own-castle does not much care about Leonora’s liaisons and fantasizes a spartan existence of “never lonely friendships stronger than the fear of death” but only at moments is able to overcome badly imagined characterization, as, to hammy lightning flashes, he swallows disappointment and pads to resolution. But it is entirely too late to rescue the vehicle.

(Released by Warner Bros./Seven Arts; not rated by MPAA.)