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
