Old Yorker

  • The Night of the Iguana

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1964)

    With two important exceptions, the chief contributors are miscast, the director included.  John Huston isn’t on Tennessee Williams’ wavelength:  that comes through most clearly at the end of this screen version of The Night of the Iguana – in the adjustments made by Huston and Anthony Veiller (who shares the screenplay credit with him) to Williams’ 1961 play’s conclusion – but it’s a problem throughout the film.  Huston’s sympathy with the characters is very selective.  He likes the randy, alcoholic protagonist, T Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), a former Episcopal priest now reduced to working as a guide for a downmarket tour operator.  Huston despises, and crudely caricatures, Shannon’s current party of tourists, women Baptist schoolteachers on a coach trip in Mexico.  The party’s one incongruous member is teenager Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who’s somehow attached to the group and keeps trying to seduce Shannon, in defiance of her hawk-eyed killjoy chaperone, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall).  After a while, the dramatis personae converge on a cheap hotel in the cliffs above Mismaloya Beach, Puerto Vallarta.  The hotel owner – earthy, recently widowed Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner) – is old friends with Shannon, and Huston likes her, too.  Two other significant characters also now enter the picture:  spinster Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr), who scrapes a living as a sketch artist, is companion to her ancient grandfather (Cyril Delevanti), a published poet in the throes of writing what he’s sure will be his final poem.  (He’s known as Nonno, presumably because he’s grandpa rather than because he’s a nonagenarian.)  Huston showcases Tennessee Williams’ collection of misfits; bar Shannon and Maxine, though, he doesn’t show them much fellow feeling.  He leaves doing that to the actors, so it’s unfortunate that he didn’t get the right ones for key roles.

    Much of the time, Richard Burton gives one of his more frustrating performances.  He’s startling in the film’s prologue, as Reverend Shannon delivers his last address from the pulpit and suffers a nervous breakdown in the process of doing so.  (Shannon has scandalised his congregation by having an inappropriate relationship with a ‘very young’ Sunday school teacher.)  Once he’s with the tour party, Burton luxuriates in his character’s jaded outrageousness, relying on the famous voice to surf his lines, of which there are many.  He doesn’t attempt to sound American.  While it’s true that he also used only the lightest of American accents in his great portrait of George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, just two years after The Night of the Iguana, the academic setting and Martha’s view of her husband helped to make sense of that.  Here, Burton’s non-Americanisation seems an expression of indifference.  This screening was part of BFI’s Richard Burton season marking the centenary of his birth.  Judging from their knowing chuckles whenever Shannon reached for the bottle, some in the NFT2 audience thought Burton was right for the part just because of his own alcoholism, which is pretty insulting to his memory.

    In contrast, Ava Gardner plays Maxine with likeable enthusiasm, but without the finesse needed to make the most of what she has to say.  Bette Davis, then Shelley Winters, had done the role on the Broadway stage.  Gardner seems to have been cast chiefly to justify Huston’s relatively upbeat ending:  why on earth wouldn’t a man like Shannon decide to make a go of living with this beautiful version of Maxine?  Sue Lyon is a lazy piece of casting – this was her first cinema appearance following Lolita (1962) – yet Lyon isn’t up to her role this time.  She can’t decide whether to play Charlotte as instinctively eager for sex or as a knowing flirt – and Huston gives her no help.  Less well known than her co-stars, Grayson Hall seizes her big-time opportunity in no uncertain terms (her reward was an Oscar nomination), but the effort shows.  Cyril Delevanti (in fact only in his mid-seventies at the time) acts his socks off, too.  Even allowing that Nonno has at least one foot in the next world, though, Delevanti is performing in isolation.

    Far from being miscast, Deborah Kerr is verging on typecast as Hannah Jelkes.  Kerr had appeared as several kinds of middle-aged spinster, in films as different as Separate Tables (1958), The Innocents (1961), The Chalk Garden (also released in 1964, a few months before The Night of the Iguana) and, before any of those, Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957).   Huston may not sympathise with what makes Hannah tick, but he trusts Deborah Kerr to do so, and the trust wasn’t misplaced.  Not too long after Hannah’s arrival in the story, there’s a momentary break in the raging melodrama, as Shannon confides in her about the young Sunday school teacher who ‘declared herself to me, wildly’.  When Hannah replies, ‘A declaration of love?’, Shannon comes back with ‘Don’t make fun of me, Miss Jelkes’, she with ‘I wasn’t’:  the quiet seriousness of the exchange has real impact and is, fortunately, a sign of things to come.  Once the coach party and their driver (Skip Ward) depart, leaving Shannon behind at the hotel in the company of Maxine and Hannah (and Nonno), The Night of the Iguana improves – thanks largely to Deborah Kerr and the effect her acting has on Richard Burton’s.  Like him, Kerr doesn’t bother with an American accent, but this is easier to accept in her case:  at least Hannah is a New Englander (‘Nantucket born and bred’).  Kerr portrays her as both politely no-nonsense and sensitive.  When she has a speech of any length, her readings, as usual, tend to become predictable.  Yet she’s a superb reactor:  her facial expressions and delivery of single lines have terrific emotional precision.  Burton the actor, as well as in the person of Shannon, seems to listen to and respect Kerr/Hannah.  Responding to her, he ups his game.

    There’s no doubt the lizards of the title are well cast, but they have too much screen time.  Even before the principals arrive at Maxine’s place, one of the tourists (Mary Boylan) catches sight of iguanas en route and recoils at the information that the locals eat such ‘disgusting creatures’.  Maxine’s cabana boys (Fidelmar Duran and Roberto Leyva) keep an iguana tied to a rope, until Shannon frees it.  On stage, the iguana may work well enough as a symbol of the human condition (trapped, struggling to be free, at the end of one’s tether, and so on).  Whatever symbolic power they had in the Williams’ original, is diluted by repeated images underlining what the iguanas mean in the film.  Perhaps Huston himself felt trapped by the source material.  His long filmography includes many adaptations of novels and other prose forms (rather few of his movies had original screenplays); but only three Huston features, including this one, were adaptations of theatre works.  (The others were Key Largo (1948) and Annie (1982).)  Every so often, he slips his leash by inserting an ‘action’ sequence, but most of these – for example, when Shannon runs down to the sea to drown himself, pursued and eventually captured by the cabana boys – are rather desperately dynamic (though a later insert, when Maxine goes to the beach with the boys, is more effective).  It’s an irony of Huston’s The Night of the Iguana that its highlights come when just a few characters are in the frame, talking rather than moving.  The film is at its best, in other words, when it’s most like a stage play.

    5 December 2025

  • La poison

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sacha Guitry (1951)

    Sacha Guitry is a famous name of French theatre, as a playwright and performer, and of French cinema, on both sides of the camera.  Until now, though, that’s all he was to me – I didn’t know his work, couldn’t even put a face to the famous name.  La poison soon changes that.  The whole film lasts only eighty-five minutes and the first six of them comprise an extraordinary credits sequence.  After a very few opening title cards, Guitry appears on screen, seated opposite La poison’s star, Michel Simon, whose praises he sings.  He then goes on to introduce and thank in turn virtually all the rest of his cast and crew – even some of the extras get a pat on the back.  This goes way beyond Orson Welles’ innovative introduction of his Mercury Theatre players at the end of Citizen Kane (1941).  As he does the rounds, fedora strategically-dipped-below-one-eye, Guitry is relaxed and benignly seigneurial.  The whole sequence – especially since it precedes (even postpones) the narrative – comes across as a display of breathtaking self-confidence on the writer-director’s part.  That self-confidence is not misplaced.

    The residents of the (fictional) village of Remonville in Normandy include Paul Braconnier (Michel Simon), a gardener by trade, and his wife, Blandine (Germaine Reuver).  The childless couple have been married for thirty years and hate each other’s guts.  The first time they’re on screen together, they pass each other in the street without exchanging a look or a word.  For quite a while, silence reigns at home, too, except for the grunts of disapproval that accompany mutual glares.  Each half of the marriage is disgusted by the other – Paul by Blandine’s frowsy appearance (though this is the pot calling the kettle black) and, especially, by her consumption of vin ordinaire, which is prodigious.  The first word he utters to his wife in the house, as he leaves for work one morning and she’s starting her first bottle of wine, is ‘Already?’   The second word, as he looks in later in the day, is ‘Again?’   Blandine’s chain-drinking seems to have no discernible effect on her mood or her housekeeping – she does always put a very basic meal on the table – until she goes out like a light.

    If looks could kill … and the Braconniers’ scowls across the table are a prelude to attempts by both to be widowed.  Blandine buys rat poison and keeps it in the kitchen cupboard until the moment’s right to use it on her husband.  After hearing a radio interview with a celebrated defence lawyer, who has recently notched up his hundredth acquittal, Paul takes a trip to Paris and contrives to see the barrister in question, Maître Aubanel (Jean Debucourt), at his chambers, in anticipation of requiring Aubanel’s services.  Paul leaves their meeting satisfied that stabbing his wife to death will be the best solution (he could plead a crime of passion, whereas poisoning’s liable to be thought premeditated).  It’s doubly apt that the stage is set for murder thanks to a shortage of table wine; and, when the killing happens, your instant reaction is to feel that a non-stop argument between the couple (even when they weren’t speaking) has now been settled.  Blandine tells Paul that if he wants more wine, he can go and buy it. By the time he returns with the bottles, she has poisoned the small amount of wine still in his glass.  She now gives him a top-up and proposes a toast.  He grimaces at the liquid’s bitter taste and, in almost the same breath, sticks a bread knife in her.

    Unlike plenty of films described as such nowadays, La poison is a true black comedy and – because it’s also truly funny – an elating one.  The breezily heartless tone is thoroughly consistent and nicely complemented by sinister but humorous music from Louiguy (aka Louis Guglielmi, best known for the music for Edith Piaf’s ‘La vie en rose’).  Marital longevity is the main but by no means the only sacred cow slain by Guitry.  He also sends up ideas of village life as an oasis of simple community and tranquillity.  In the pharmacy, the haberdasher Mme Michaud (Pauline Carton), with the permission of the chemist, M Gaillard (Georges Bever), reads through his prescriptions book:  the details of their medications enable Mme Michaud to justify her dim view of various other locals.  Blandine, buying venom for vermin, is the chemist’s next but one customer.  Gaillard is always ready to help.  Hearing that a murder has been committed chez Braconnier, he assumes the man of the house has been rat-poisoned, and rushes there to reveal to the police the culprit.  When he sees that she’s in fact the corpse, he faints; another helpful person tries to bring him round with the toxic wine that Paul barely touched, and that’s the end of M Gaillard.

    Early on, a group of villagers visit the parish priest (Albert Duvaleix) to express concern about Remonville’s low profile and standard of living, offering startling suggestions of how to put the place on the map.  The suggestions include quintuplets, a bad road accident and a fake miracle, but not murder.  The uxoricide, however, proves to be just the job – shock-horror news that turns Remonville into a tourist attraction and transforms the local economy.   When Paul eventually stands trial, Guitry cross-cuts between the courtroom and village children playing outdoor games.  The youngsters act out their version of the crime, the trial and its aftermath with such enthusiasm that the flower-seller, Mme Tyberghen (Jeanne Fusier-Gir), has to keep intervening.  One little boy comes closer to the guillotine than the real defendant, never mind the guillotine’s made of paper.  His execution is halted first by the florist, then by the triumphal return home of Paul.  Mme Tyberghen presents him with a bouquet.  He’s carried aloft on the shoulders of male companions eager to partake of his victory.  Louiguy has now changed his tune, to a parody of standard-issue, happy-ending music.  The atmosphere is such that the locals might as well be singing, ‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’.  Paul Braconnier (the surname means poacher) is now a free man in more ways than one.

    The trial’s climax and the finale are a blithe assertion of La poison’s misogyny.  Having pleaded self-defence, Paul really starts to turn the courtroom tide by showing judges and jury – all men, of course – a photograph of his late wife that ‘will convince you more than anything I could say’.  In the event, he says plenty more that’s outrageously chauvinistic.  It’s true the story vilifies only one woman, but Blandine is so much the dominant female character that she can’t fail to seem representative and, in the trial, is discussed as such.  The film’s title says it all:  the French word for poison is a masculine noun (’le poison’); ‘la poison’ means a spiteful (poisonous) woman.  Guitry is also intent throughout on lampooning legal and judicial process and opportunism.  Enjoying the sound of his own voice as he stands in the dock, Paul remarks aside to Maître Aubanel ‘how much the fact of having committed a crime develops the intelligence’.  In fact, the village gardener outwits distinguished counsel throughout.  Paul uses their first interview to elicit from Aubanel a plausible defence and does so by telling the lawyer that he’s already committed the crime.  When Aubanel discovers the lie, he visits Paul in his prison cell, delivering a sharp reprimand and making clear he won’t defend him in court.  Paul promptly blackmails Aubanel into a U-turn by threatening to reveal who provided his murderous MO.  At the trial, Paul is increasingly happy to ignore Aubanel’s advice.  The eloquent barrister merely, mutely does what his client instructs, such as passing round that photo of the victim.  Aubanel secures acquittal 101 thanks entirely to the accused.

    Guitry was so eager to get Michel Simon for the role that he agreed to the actor’s condition of doing each of his many scenes in a single take.  This is presumably part of how this small masterpiece came to be shot in under a fortnight.  As previously, repeatedly admitted (see L’Atalante and Drôle de drame), I’ve never enjoyed watching Michel Simon.  La poison changed that, too.  Simon is gross perfection here.  His portrait of an engaging monster is completely natural, as well as theatrically satisfying.  The same goes for Germaine Reuver, whose Blandine is a worthy adversary and the embodiment of a shrew.  (Thrusting her face combatively upwards at her much taller husband, she seems to have even the snout.)   I didn’t recognise Reuver or any of the other supporting players, but they are, for the most part, a fine collection of eccentric mugs, and expertly cast.  The few more conventional-looking exceptions are just as effective:  Jean Debucourt is, until Paul gets the better of Aubanel, splendidly sure of himself, yet fatuous.  Despite the very short shooting schedule, this black-and-white film is a handsome piece of work:  the opening thankyous to cinematographer Jean Bachelet and editor Raymond Lamy were particularly well deserved.  I’m so pleased to have seen La poison.   The acquired taste that Michel Simon must be, is now acquired.  The closed book that was Sacha Guitry has been opened.

    3 December 2025

     

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