Night of the Iguana [VHS]
by John Huston
![Night of the Iguana [VHS]](/images/Night-of-the-Iguana-VHS-6301977769-L.jpg)
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Richard Burton, Skip Ward, Sue LyonDirector: John Huston
Producer: Emilio Fern?ndez
Producer: John Huston
Writer: John Huston
Producer: Ray Stark
Producer: Sandy Whitelaw
Writer: Anthony Veiller
Writer: Tennessee Williams
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog; Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, NTSC
Running Time: 125 minutes
Release Date: 1994-06-30
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Studio: MGM (Warner)
VHS Movie Reviews of Night of the Iguana [VHS]
Movie Review: Much better than I had been led to believe
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Summary of Night of the Iguana [VHS]
The Night of the Iguana may be Richard Burton's finest hour on the screen: beautifully cast as an anguished, defrocked reverend, doomed to his own purgatory in Mexico as tour guide to a group of nattering biddies. (The expression on his face as the ladies warble "Happy Days Are Here Again" on the tour bus is worth a Shakespearian monologue.) John Huston's clean, black-comic adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play is a forceful snapshot of a man down to his last chance, and the superb black-and-white location photography by Gabriel Figueroa captures the end-of-the-world vibe. The women who tempt and taunt the reverend are Ava Gardner (with her maraca-shaking beach boys), Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon. The movie--and its backstage publicity, with Burton and Liz Taylor carrying on their Cleopatra affair--put Puerto Vallarta on the map, but it deserves notice for Burton's gutsy acting and Huston's characteristic sympathy for life's losers. --Robert HortonDrama VHS Video
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