The Night of the Iguana

Huston does a great job of "opening" this play up, but the carefully etched characters' penchant 4 discussions that touch on the more profound areas of humanity like loss, social expectation& God-instilled desires reveal its stage roots. Luckily Williams' writing has a sense of humor: his protagonists may all be in various states of despair, but they're also optimistic& surprisingly (4 its time) libidinal, which keeps them relatable& never dull. The ending's incongruously pat, but the rest works

Fantastic performance by Ava Gardner in this stunning melodrama.

Proudly embracing sentiment and tastefully manifesting cloudy romanticism, this is a passionately thoughtful work, mixing the grievous with the saucy... All in a toweringly poetic tone. Is this John Huston? This isn't the Huston I knew (after The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen); this is a perceptive filmmaker dealing with intimate and intangible matters...

There are tense issues that are introduced, and the way they are resolved is through very real and progressive transformation. As in anyone's life, Reverend T. Shannon's most haunting, plaguing problems are abstract, and they take care of themselves.

Adapting a movie from a play usually has an uphill battle. While this is intelligent dialogue, it felt artificial at times. Burton was excellent.

A little talky and sluggish, but with good performances and a lot of atmosphere. Ava Gardner is awesome.

Score based on distant memory.

Something really struck me with this one. Enchanting. Then again, I always fall for Tennessee Williams.

I didn't know it was a Tennessee Williams play until looking it up on this site, but it's a very solid movie. I constantly say how some movies haven't aged well, but I feel this one feels fresh in a surprising amount of ways.

Boy, just the cast here is fantastic: a drunken cad in Burton, Lolita part 2 in Lyon, and a brassy Gardner (and throw in Grayson Hall too) really liven this up. But even with the decent scenery, it's very obvious this is just a filmed play, with quite a few characters giving much longer speeches than were likely, and a few scenes (like the choreographed beach fight) just extend the running time. Somewhere in there is a story about redemption that feels like it's been done better in other places.

play is better.

This didn't click with me like WOOLF or DESIRE, but it's not bad. Well-paced character drama with some good comedy and a fair amount of racy material, and very well shot in a remote location. It seems a little overwritten at times, but it sheds some decent light on the human condition. Gardner pretty much steals the show with a sharp, brassy performance, although Burton is good, too. Kerr kinda bores me, but she's okay. I enjoyed this film, even if it probably won't stick with me very long.

John Huston's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play smooths out it's edges quite a bit without eliminating it's bite entirely. Burton is really good here and uncharacteristically restrained, at least for this period of his career. Deborah Kerr, playing an itinerant painter travelling with her elderly poet grandfather (Cyril Delevanti), has great rapport with him and their scenes are really the heart of the play.

absolutely excellent

An Episcopalian, a Baptist, and a humanist "nun" walk into a bar. . . The film's always watchable and never boring. That said, these kinds of overwrought performances (Kerr excepted) tend to wear on me as they take me out of the moment and into the performance. Overall, the characters' various searches for some measure of peace were all nuanced through the sharp writing, while Huston brings a sense of claustrophobia through the resort where the freedom of the sea always seems just out of reach.

The amount of humor and twists in the plot never makes this boring or dour, which is always a fear when filming plays. Instead it's a great showcase for all its' main actors, Burton being one of the all-time greats and the four main actresses giving him a great deal to work against. Remarkable.