Hamburg Noir

HISTORY

The Night of the Iguana

Short story
The Night of the Iguana (Tennessee Williams, 1948)

Play
The Night of the Iguana (Tennessee Williams, 1961)

Film
The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

People don’t usually associate Tennessee Williams plays with pulp fiction or film noir. This one is both. It’s a dark morality play that began as a short story.

The Night of the Iguana is the story of three badly damaged characters seeking redemption in dark places. The telling turns readers and viewers into voyeurs, albeit for good purpose.

This guilty pleasure by Tennessee Williams began in the late 1940s as a short story, something he staged in the early 1960s, first as a play in one act and later in three. It was adapted shortly afterward into a full-length film by John Huston, who directed classic noir films like Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon. (In later life, he played the evil Noah Cross in the neo-noir film Chinatown.)

Of course, Iguana doesn’t have the usual hardboiled trademarks. There’s no slick casino owner in a white dinner jacket and pencil-thin mustache holding court to oversized thugs. There’s no smokey-voiced torch singer seducing a seedy private detective into crossing a red line that will likely get him jailed or killed. In fact, there aren’t any killings at all, just a death by natural causes. What we do have is a tormented anti-hero who fights demons as dangerous as the villains faced by Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.

When we meet him, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon -- an Episcopalian clergyman from New England who was defrocked for getting a little too close to a young female member of his flock -- is a tour guide for a cut-rate travel agency in Mexico. As fate would have it, he’s leading a busload of middle-aged women from a Baptist bible college in West Texas. Their leader, Judith Fellowes, is a closet lesbian keeping a close eye on her teenage charge, Charlotte Goodall, who, in turn, has an eye on Rev. Shannon.

For the tormented pastor, the pretty, flirtatious Charlotte is the embodiment of temptation. In a desperate attempt to ward off her advances, he has her get down on her knees with him and pray. Their kneeling position becomes the prone position, as the good reverend would say. At this inopportune moment, Miss Fellows bursts in and threatens to get Shannon fired.

To prevent Miss Fellows from contacting his employers back home, Rev. Shannon drives the tour bus up to a remote hillside hotel run by Maxine Faulk, the beautiful widow of his good friend, and pockets the distributor cap, stranding the good ladies from Texas. He then proceeds to go on a protracted drinking spree that gets so out of control that Maxine finally ties him down in a hammock -- with the help of two local beach boys. These shirtless studs seem to spend their days dancing around with maracas and their nights taking ocean swims with Maxine. They also capture the iguana for which the play and film are named.

From his hammock bondage, Rev. Shannon rages at the world, quoting chapter and verse from the King James Bible. The only thing that calms him down is the arrival of Hannah Jelkes, a pretty spinster, and her elderly poet grandfather. Hannah is able to get through to Rev. Shannon because she is his opposite in almost every way. She quietly helps him back to sanity, earning the eternal jealousy of Maxine. It’s a refreshingly intelligent love triangle, one that teaches its participants critical lessons in brutal fashion.

In the film, the lead role is played by Richard Burton, who’s been described as “the last of the great sinners.” He was reputed to carry three books on his travels: the King James Bible, the Collected Works of William Shakespeare, and the Oxford English Dictionary. His travels often took him to Puerto Vallarta, a resort town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where he shared a villa -- a refuge, really -- with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married twice in the course of their turbulent relationship. In the film, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that Burton is playing himself.

The same can be said of Ava Gardener as Maxine. Her very public private life was filled with lust, love, and late-night shenanigans. A dark, intelligent version of Marilyn Monroe from North Carolina who attended Atlantic Christian College, she had short flings with Mexican bullfighters and longer relationships with prominent men such as John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, her third husband. In this film, she doesn’t appear to be acting, just living who she is.

Finally, Miss Jelkes is played by Deborah Kerr, a delicate-looking Scottish stage actress who crossed the pond to work in Hollywood. Her quiet but strong stage presence and precise diction contrast nicely with Burton’s primitive, if literate, bellowing.

As it turns out, Miss Jelkes is not as prudish as she appears. During the course of the long night, the Rev. Shannon hears her confession about a secret sin she committed in her youth. This takes place shortly after her grandfather finishes his last, lengthy poem -- and just before he dies in his sleep. Somehow, this peaceful completion of a life releases Miss Jelkes, Maxin, and the Rev. Shannon from their respective demons, at least for the moment. It also completes the circle of repentance and redemption.