I was on the verge—not breakdown for that is the fate of our lead, the Rev. Lawrence Shannon—of titling this column piece “A Lizard, of all things, as metaphor,” but I can imagine how our readers may find repulsive the image that immediately greets them. Besides, Tennessee Williams has the reputation for the acutely unforgettable titles of his works. Think of A Streetcar Named Desire.
The title credits of the Night of the Iguana do begin with a lizard occupying screen prominence that one is urged to find the meaning behind the reptile. Here begins my problem. How do I make of it? Who is the iguana? Who are the iguanas?
But let us begin where the iguanas are not yet discovered: inside the Episcopal Church. The unblemished exterior of the sacred place towers over the landscape. The camera enters the church. Inside, the faithful are all gathered. They are singing the hymn for that part of the service. A young priest is revealed on the altar: Richard Burton at his prettiest/handsomest before grief from his consuming love for Liz Taylor gave him gravitas. With the confidence of one who knows when the hymn is ending, he slowly walks up to the pulpit. For the generation who know the actor with his voice that is pure velvet with just the right amount of metallic edge to cause the listener to tremble, the first words spoken are unalloyed metal. This actor can act by just opening his lips and letting the syllables tumble down to mortals blessed with less vowels and even lesser consonants. He fumbles and soon loses it. He shouts and rants and the people lose their fidelity as they hurry out into the rain. The priest hurls condemnation. Thunder and lightning! Thus begins the film about the nights of lizards. There is one requisite: the energy of Burton has to be matched by all the other actors, or he will appear as if he has wandered from the Hamlet set onto another where characters speak a different language. This does not happen.
The next scene finds us in poor, poor Mexico.
This was in the 1940s or around that era. The pastor has become a tour guide for a busload of spinsters led by a “butch” vocal teacher, the only concession to defining this character as lesbian. She is the guardian of a very young girl, played by Sue Lyon. Blonde or even platinum blonde (it is hard to tell in this black-and-white film), she continues the long procession of blonde sex symbols (Jean Harlow, Jane Mansfield, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe). This nubile woman is a nymphet as they were called then. She is always coming on to the Episcopalian priest in a dumb way, for that is how Lyon’s acting also comes across.
They all end up in a resort on the hill managed by a woman, Maxine, who is recently widowed. She is played by the impossibly beautiful Ava Gardner. Up in her cluster of villas, guests are welcomed by these two shirtless young Mexican muscle men forever playing the maracas. To this human menagerie is added a middle-aged woman and her very old grandfather, the oldest living practicing poet. The woman paints for a living and the old man can read his poems to anyone willing to listen. He is finishing a poem that would be his last.
Rehash these personas in your mind. They are almost the same denizens of the Williams mad universe, the same citizens populating the states of mind of the writer.
In John Lahr’s biography of Tennessee Williams, the playwright would describe the theme of the play [and the film] as having something to do with “how to live beyond despair and still live.”
Watching the film now with all these extra-cinematic dimensions, I can only imagine the power of the play onstage even as I look askance at what I feel are missing in the film version. For all the critical acclaim it has received as being one of the most intellectual of Williams’s plays, I—and I expect the audience as well—cannot feel the spiritual direness in the character of the defrocked priest in Burton. His voice and body—and those eyes—when they are agitated to perform for the camera take over the screen. Gardner comes close to a presence but in this film the great beauty is merely that—a great beauty. The heavier role is given to Deborah Kerr as Hannah whose character is found in the directorial notes of the play: “Ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint but animated.”
Kerr, noted for her ultra-romantic style (in films like An Affair to Remember), is not manic enough to play one of the heroines of Williams.
There is a scant material on the film version of The Night of the Iguana in the autobiography of the playwright but there is a rich trove of insights and diatribes in the staging of the piece as a play. The book states how the role of Hannah was, according to Williams, created for Katharine Hepburn. In the original version on Broadway, Maxine went to Bette Davis. Imagine these two onscreen. No film, I believe, could carry the weight of the celebrity, ego and eccentricities of these two legends.
The Night of the Iguana, directed by John Huston, is part of a boxed collection of Williams’s plays that include A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, Baby Doll, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, plus a bonus disc on Tennessee Williams’s South. The films, together with more titles, are part of a donation from Luis Cabalquinto, a New York-based Bicolano poet. They will be used as resource when Kamarin, an art space and cinema bar adjacent to Savage Mind bookstore, opens in Naga City this March.