The Night of the Iguana

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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This being Tennessee Williams’ birthday month, another of the films made from his plays will be showing at the Tropic Cinema. This event is sponsored by Key West Arts & Historical Society, the non-profit organization that recently assumed management of the local Tennessee Williams Museum.

The film selected for this Monday night is “The Night of the Iguana.”

This is one of my favorites, in that I once went dancing with one of its stars (Sue Lyon, not Ava Gardner). I met Sue Lyon at a movie premiere in Miami, back when she was still had that jailbait allure she’d exhibited in “Lolita.”

She was a young temptress in “The Night of the Iguana,” too.

The stage play by Tennessee Williams debuted on Broadway in 1961. He based it on an earlier short story. A few years later, director John Huston transformed it into an Academy Award-winning movie.

“The Night of the Iguana” tells about an Episcopal priest who has been kicked out of his church for having an inappropriate relationship with a “very young Sunday school teacher.” Now working as a tour guide in Mexico, Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton, perfectly cast in the boozer role) has all but given in to his demons — flesh and alcohol.

When a 17-year-old girl on the tour (that’s Sue Lyon, of course) tries to seduce him, her aunt threatens to get him fired. So Shannon hijacks the bus and takes his charges to an out-of-the-way Costa Verde hotel run by a blousy widow (and that would be Ava Gardner), a sensual woman who surrounds herself with handsome young cabana boys.

Matters get complicated when a penniless but very proper painter from Nantucket (Deborah Kerr at her demure best) turns up with her aging poet grandfather.

By this point, Shannon is “at the end of his rope,” just like an iguana kept tied by the cabana boys.

Although Tennessee Williams’ plays are known for their “acceptance of the human condition and courage in the face of despair,” John Huston chose to add a somewhat happier ending to the movie — at least for the priest.

Time Magazine called it “one of the best movies ever made from a Tennessee Williams play.” And Huston won a Writers Guide of America award for advancing “the literature of the motion picture through the years.”

Nevertheless, when Huston met up years later with Tennessee Williams in London, the author brought up the movie, saying, “I still don’t like the finish, John!”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com