The Night of the Iguana: Into the Archive

[Nowhere near as raunchy as the cover would have you believe.]

          “The Night of the Iguana” is a 1964 movie directed by John Huston and based on the 1961 play by Tennessee Williams.

Richard Burton is the disgraced Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, who has been reduced to being a guide for a cheap touring company in Mexico. When the thorny and repressed Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall) accuses him of seducing her young ward (Sue Lyon), he strands the whole touring company at a remote hotel while he plays for time. The hotel is run by Maxine Falk (Ava Gardner), the recent widow of an old friend, and a flamboyant and plain-talking broad. Into this mix comes Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) a chaste, insightful painter who travels with her grandfather (the elderly minor poet Nonno, played by Cyril Delevanti) as they eke out a marginal existence. Miss Fellowes overcomes all Shannon’s maneuvers and leaves to carry out her plan to ruin him. Shannon struggles with his situation through the long night, complicated by alcohol and other fleshly appetites; he feels as if he is as tethered to his condition as the iguana that is being kept tied up at the hotel for slaughter and cooking the next day. His mind becomes so desperate (he attempts suicide) that he is finally physically tied up in a hammock. The artist Hannah, who has learned much through her struggling life, offers him comfort and counsel, and in the end, she releases him. It is just in time for Nonno, who has been striving to complete final poem, to recite the words for Jelkes to write down. The old man passes away minutes later. The next morning Hannah, freed herself by her grandfather’s death, leaves, as Shannon and Maxine come to an understanding. While he has lost his job as a tour guide (and with it any chance of taking up his religious career again), he has a new position helping Maxine run her hotel. The iguana has been set free.  

I love Nonno’s poem (asking for courage in the face of death and corruption, and written of course by Tennessee Williams himself). For years I thought that Ava Gardner was Elizabeth Taylor, disappearing into another earthy role like her Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I am glad to be corrected. Taylor was there with Burton during filming near Puerto Vallarta, at the time “a remote little fishing village”; they would be married soon after. John Huston was so impressed with the fishing in the area that he bought a house about eight miles out of town. Puerto Vallarta experienced an upsurge of popularity and prosperity after the movie; in 1988 they erected a bronze statue of Huston in gratitude.