The Night of the Iguana
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Movie Reviews of The Night of the Iguana
Movie Review: Night of the Iguana
Summary: 5 Stars
A wonderful movie with old time charm. Done in Black and White it was very facinating to see how this movie could have been such a big success when colored films were already the big hit. I would recommend this movie to all movie buffs.Movie Review: The Night of the Iguana
Summary: 5 Stars
Although a classic old movie from 1964, the characters and dialog were surprisingly contemporary. A great play was made into a terrific movie which still resonates today. Great fun to see Richard Burton at his best.Movie Review: Night of the Iguana "Timeless"
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is black and white but you can't help but think "wait a minute"...the issues, lessons in this great film could be of and for today!
A classic, that is timeless.
Movie Review: A film not to miss
Summary: 5 Stars
Whether you agree or not with the following reviews after you've seen the movie, it remains a film to see and enjoy, given its cast, writer and director.Movie Review: Much better than I had been led to believe
Summary: 4 Stars
[Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.]
Although "The Night of the Iguana" is not considered one of Tennessee Williams's best plays it is nonetheless an interesting piece of work. John Huston's interpretation, starring Richard Burton as the Rev. Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, Williams's defrocked, alcoholic clergyman, is also not considered one of Huston's best films, but is nonetheless an interesting venture.
Burton gives a steady performance while Ava Gardner is excellent in a limited role as Maxine Faulk, a woman of a certain age: too old for boy toys and too young to toss in the towel. What she would like now that her old hubby is dead is for Shannon to fall in love with her. Shannon has come to her Mexican hotel and restaurant with a busload of unhappy Baptist College faculty tourists. He has failed as a clergyman and is now failing as a tour guide. Sue Lyon, not far removed from the title role in Kubrick's Lolita (1962) plays Charlotte Goodall, a teenaged tease trying to further debauch the compromised Rev. Shannon. Deborah Kerr has an interesting part as the chaste daughter of a free-spirit traveling grandfather/granddaughter team of street artists who happens to arrive at the hotel as her elderly grandfather is near collapse. Grayson Hall plays Judith Fellowes, a hardnosed Baptist lady about whom Shannon says: "Miss Fellowes is a highly moral person. If she ever recognized the truth about herself it would destroy her"--that truth being...well, let's just say she likes Charlotte more than she knows.
The film was shot on locale in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico before the tourist build-up during an era in which Mexico was Hollywood's safe and idyllic playground. A sense of the laidback attitude prevailing then can be recalled in the popular song from the forties "Manana, Manana is good enough for me." It was a playground in which anything could be had for pennies on the peso including things immoral, illegal and even downright unhealthy--come to think of it, pretty much as now, except the price has gone up quite a bit and it's not so safe anymore.
The Night of the Iguana comes in the middle of John Huston's long career as one of filmland's greatest directors, 23 years after The Maltese Falcon (1941) and 23 years before The Dead (1987). It is a film characterized by an authentic locale, atmospheric shots and the sharp, witty dialogue of one of America's pre-eminent playwrights in Tennessee Williams. It is a film at once satirical with clearly etched characters, deeply understood as only Williams, Chekov, Shakespeare and a few other playwrights are capable of creating. Huston stays faithful to Williams's underlying critique of human sexuality and the hypocrisy surrounding it while getting the best out of a very good cast.
The only disappointment is Miss Lyon who played her part without finesse. She complained at some point in her career that she had been typecast out of good parts because she had played Lolita. However one can see here that Lyon, as pretty as she was, was not talented or charismatic enough to become a star.
Ava Gardner on the other hand had already been a star and was in fine form, relishing playing Maxine Faulk, the in-charge, earthy woman of the world. She gets to take a shot at the prissy but slightly butch Judith Fellowes when Fellowes allows that she teaches "voice" at the college. Maxine counters with, "Well, geography is my specialty. Did you know that if it wasn't for the dikes, the plains of Texas would be engulfed by the gulf?"
Burton seemed entirely at home playing a character who was not far removed from his own persona, as was the case with Deborah Kerr whose character here was not too far removed from that of Anna Leonowens whom she played so beautifully in The King and I (1956).
See this for John Huston, one of cinema's greatest directors.