by Sheila Seclearr
Be sure to visit the new website for all film buffs, FlickeringMyth.com. Especially check out my post of the John Huston classic, The Night of the Iguana. If you don’t see it on the front page, click on the right on Film Reviews. Scroll down here for highlights:
Classic Film Review: Night of the Iguana (1964)
Directed by John Huston
Starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon
After being defrocked from the ministry, Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Burton) is leading a ladies’ bus tour of Mexico’s churches and religious sites. Teenage seductress Charlotte (Sue Lyon, right after her starring role in Lolita) is determined to snag the interest of Shannon. Her protectress, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall), the ringleader of the ladies’ tour, has a jealousy laden with lesbian undertones. The conflict between Fellowes and Shannon intensifies when the young girl slips into Shannon’s room one night and, of course, Fellowes catches them and vows to have Shannon fired.
The film becomes remarkable after Shannon takes control of the bus and whisks them all to his old haunt, an inn atop the hill at Mismaloya, outside Puerto Vallarta. He sabotages the bus, thinking there’ll be no chance to contact the company and have him fired. The inn is run by the wild and raucous Maxine Faulk, played brilliantly by Ava Gardner. She defends, even applauds Shannon’s unruly character and opens her doors to the group plus a traveling poet and his granddaughter Hannah (Deborah Kerr), a ‘New England spinster’ who turns out to be more liberal and forgiving than the others.
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Even with massive and gorgeous jungle landscape flowing down the mountains to the sea, very few minutes of the film showed the magnificent setting. Those that did, were intensely memorable, including a ludicrous fight scene when the bus driver defends Charlotte at the palapa cantina or when Maxine douses her frustrations surfside against the buff bare chests of her two “beach boys.”
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Hannah (Kerr) is the surprising hero who says “nothing human disgusts me” and helps Shannon give his demons “the slip” in the unforgettable scene with Burton laced into a veranda hammock. The other surprise, watching it now, is the portentous ‘green’ speech by Shannon about man’s inhumanity to God and how we’ve poisoned the planet and wreaked havoc for nature. Buy that man another rum and coke.
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The two short films included in the recent DVD release are also briefly reviewed:
On the Trail of the Iguana
Night of the Iguana: Huston’s Gamble
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