Tennessee Williams plays sometimes included such lyrical outbursts as to seem operatic. That is, they contained larger-than-life emoting about betrayed dreams and included the occasional aria bearing little resemblance to ordinary human speech. ("Streetcar Named Desire" was turned into an opera, though with equivocal success.)

The last of his commercial successes and also the last of his critical successes was the 1961 play "Night of the Iguana" which starred Bette Davis, Patrick O'Neal, and Margaret Leighton on Broadway. In rereading the play recently, as I wrote (at http://www.epinions.com/content_123436437124), I tried to imagine them in the play. Although I know what each of them looked like and can imagine them saying the lanes, my memory of the movie overwhelmed my imagination. I gave up, found, and watched the movie version again.

Screen censorship hurt some of the movie adaptations of Williams plays (Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). The only constraint that I could detect in the "Night of the Iguana" screenplay was to remove explicit discussion by the recently widowed hotel owner of how having sex with the hired help (Pepe and Pedro) made it hard to manage them in their jobs around the hotel. In the movie, it would be possible for a very naive viewer to imagine that Maxine (played fiercely by Ava Gardner) only dances and swims with the always shirtless "beach boys." However, even as a naive/backward teenager when I first saw the movie, I had no doubts they Maxine was taking them to bed, probably both of them at the same time. I guess the movie also obscures that the Rev. Shannon (Richard Burton) got it on with an underaged parishioner. However, the movie is more explicit than the play that )Miss Fellowes (the shrewish Grayson Hall), the chaperone of the oversexed teenager, Charlotte (Sue Lyons, much less coy than she was as Lolita for Stanley Kubrick two years earlier), is jealous of Shannon because Charlotte prefers Shannon's company (etc.) to hers.

Like the film version of Period of Adjustment, the film version of "Night of the Iguana" begins by showing backstory that was narrated in the stage version. Specifically, before the opening credits, it shows Richard Burton breaking down in front of his congregation and pushing them out of the church. After the credits, the audience sees Charlotte flirting with the Rev. Shannon, while the rest of the tour group from the Texas Baptist College is looking at a baroque church. That evening, Charlotte sneaks into his room and there is a hullabaloo when he ejects her. Charlotte is portrayed as an adult molester (and her raging hormones propel her this way and that over the course of the movie), the Rev. Shannon as dismayed, disheveled, and desperately afraid of losing his job as a tour-group leader as Miss Fellows rages at him for seducing a minor and otherwise being a lousy tour-group leader.

Shannon hijacks the bus to seek refuge at a rustic hotel outside Puerto Vallarta. He learns from Maxine that her husband and his friend, Fred, recently died. He is playing for time and trying to keep Miss Fellows from contacting his employer. The battle between the unconscious lesbian and the "man of God" with a weakness for young females is lively. When Charlotte finally gives up on Shannon, she snags Maxine's boytoys, Pepe and Pedro, and dances so provocatively in a beach-front cantina, that she is 86ed. This is not in the play and leads to a very funny attempt by Charlotte's next champion, the bus driver Hank, to fight the boys who bob and weave, evading his every punch and playfully pounding him. The fight (and also the earlier pursuit of Shannon into the water by Charlotte, the later pursuit of Shannon in the water by Pepe and Pedro, and Maxine dancing in the waves with Pepe and Pedro) is added to the play which took place entirely on the hotel verandah. It is lively, photogenic, and very funny—funny in a way that is different from the animus of Miss Fellowes for Shannon and Charlotte's throwing herself at him. Both of the latter is dark humor, but the fight is farcical, and literally sunny.

Everything is filmed in high-contrast black-and-white by the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who photographed the memorable images in Buņuel films as Los Olvidados, Exterminating Angel, Nazarin, Simon of the Desert, as well as those in "The Pearl" and John Ford's "The Fugitive"). I remember that the movie put Puerto Vallarta on the map as a vacation destination in 1964, and the resort continues to look like a respite from the seemingly disintegrating characters.

There is a tethered iguana, a not-very-subtle metaphor for others of God's creatures at the end of their rope(s): not only Shannon, but Maxine (widowed and fed up with the place), and the destitute quick-sketch artist Hannah (a spinsterly Deborah Kerr) and her 97-year-old poet grandfather (Cyril Delevanti, who was in reality only 65 at the time the movie was made). Miss Fellowes is also at the end of her rope, though apparently not conscious of what is strangling her, and Miss Peebles (Mary Boylan) is ailing.*

However, as has become clear to me from my recent immersion in Tennessee Williams plays and movies based on them, the seemingly damned tend to emerge from humiliations and disillusionments with a renewed will to live and try to make the best of situations they would previously have regarded as unbearable.

I think that the movie improves on the play's ending. It does not change the ultimate position of any of the characters, but moves them to these positions more skillfully. The screenplay also provides a larger part for Maxine, which is welcome because Ava Gardner is such a force of nature (rivaling Ana Magnani in The Rose Tattoo) and a more rounds of the Shannon/Fellowes match.

For me, the play grinds to a halt for long speeches (arias) of Hannah and Shannon in the third act. Hannah has an impossible (new) speech in the movie (surely, if anyone could have brought it off, it was Kerr), but there is less of the two of them out on the verandah riffing on cruelty and the weaknesses of the flesh. All in all, I think that the movie improves on the play, trimming the lyrical flights of talk (but keeping all the best lines), adding action and more humor, providing striking images, plus showcasing the most vital performance of Ava Gardner, and a relatively restrained performance from Richard Burton at his peak (he had played another anguished cleric that year in the title role of "Becket," and in the following two years added his other great performances in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?").

Although many of John Huston's films based on prestigious literary texts are disappointing (especially, The Red Badge of Courage, The Roots of Heaven; and to a lesser degree, Under the Volcano, Wise Blood), I think that some of his ventures of the 1960s are under-rated (at least Ava Gardner's part as Sarah in "The Bible," the totality of "Reflections in a Golden Eye," and I'd argue for the images in "The Misfits"). They are both dramatic and visually very rewarding. "Night of the Iguana" has a particularly outstanding set of performances in all the credited parts and also has a striking and distinctive look.
 
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*Charlotte, Pepe, and Pedro are, in contrast, very lively, and I will not get into whether they are condescended to or into the racial and sexual politics of their parts.

In addition to the reviews of middle-period Williams linked within this review, I have also recently written about
Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth.
 



Recommended:
Yes