The Night of the Iguana (1964)

What the studio pressbook said

MGM’s 1964 exhibitors’ campaign book tells the casting as a race. Over one weekend, it says, Stark flew to Ireland to see Huston, then to Madrid to sign Gardner as Maxine (Bette Davis’s part on stage), then to Switzerland for Kerr as Hannah (Margaret Leighton’s part), and closed the three-day trip in London by signing Burton as Shannon. Lyon was the one star he could find at home, in Hollywood, and the pressbook calls this her first film since Lolita. The same book reminds exhibitors that Huston won the 1948 Academy Award for directing Treasure of Sierra Madre and had recently drawn a supporting-actor nomination for his acting debut in The Cardinal.

The location story centers on Mismaloya, a tiny fishing village on the Pacific coast. To reach it, the pressbook says, the company took a taxi to a Puerto Vallarta beach and then went eight miles across the bay by dugout canoe or boat. One crew member likened the trip to “landing at Anzio,” and Kerr is quoted laughing, “After getting there, everything else seemed easy.” A replica of an old Mexican hotel stood on a peak about 300 feet above the water. Local workers felled a 37-foot beam of about four tons in the jungle, and because it would not float, engineers lashed it to empty gasoline drums and towed it to the site.

The pressbook reports two months of shooting with no incidents. Huston joked that he had given Burton, Gardner, Kerr, Lyon and Elizabeth Taylor, who had come along, derringers loaded with bullets engraved with one another’s names, and added, “You can’t blame me.” Night work ran to 3:00 a.m., and when Burton was told at 2:30 one morning that his next scene had him hanging upside down in a hammock, he replied, “I’ve never acted upside down before.” After work, the book says, he talked at the bar about 17th-century literature and his schooldays in Wales. A village mother, asked if she knew the stars, pointed at Gardner water-skiing on the bay and said, “There goes Lana Turner!”

The trade review

The Film Daily critic called the film a “stirring, disturbing tale” and said Huston’s “perceptive direction” guided the cast “with distinction.” The review pictured Gardner’s Maxine as an aging, fiery beauty who keeps two local beachboys as playthings, and it gave the grandfather’s age as 98. Its cast list names James Ward as the bus driver who falls for Lyon’s character. The reviewer praised Gabriel Figueroa’s photography and wrote that Benjamin Frankel’s score “deepens the mood” without intruding. The review also noted that the play had won the New York Drama Critics’ award as the best play of the 1961-62 season.

The New York reviews

The papers were divided. Time placed it among “the best movies ever made” from a Williams play. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times argued that the picture never showed what made its people so helpless and hopeless, so their suffering never came to feel meaningful. He called Burton “spectacularly gross” and Lyon’s acting “painfully awkward.”

Later accounts

Later accounts add some casting stories. James Garner said he had been offered Shannon and turned it down as “too Tennessee Williams for me.” Stark had hoped Huston would play the grandfather, and Huston declined so that he could concentrate on directing. These accounts put principal photography at 72 days, while the pressbook says two months. Gardner’s Wikipedia entry records that Huston insisted on black-and-white and later regretted it because the local plants were so brightly colored. When Huston received the Writers Guild’s Laurel Award, Allan Sherman sang a comic song to the tune of “Streets of Laredo,” teasing that the company did things at night “no self-respecting iguana would do.” The film won the Academy Award for costume design. In later years FilmInk called it perhaps “the most delightfully well cast Williams adaptation.”

Further reading

Gardner’s star page covers the rest of her career. Her own Ava: My Story, published in 1990, and Lee Server’s biography Ava Gardner are good places to start.