Night of the Iguana

A priest defrocked because of a roll in the vestry with an underage girl is reduced to driving a “religious” tour bus of Baptist ladies through Mexico. He lectures, he sweats, he tolerates the camp songs, but he doesn’t reckon with a young Lolita (traveling with her maiden aunt) who decides to seduce him. He’s misunderstood, he’s about to be fired and he loses it…takes the bus off the main road to a tacky little fishing resort owned by an old friend. But the friend is dead and the widow is a wild, sexual spirit who sleeps around with the houseboys. Into this mess–the Baptist ladies, the seductive young girl, the sexy widow–comes an aged man and his granddaughter. They travel from town to town, she drawing pictures in the square and he reciting his poems, trying to earn enough food money until he dies–he’s only waiting to finish a last poem and he’s off…

This is pure Tennessee Williams. One of our major American playwrights, an out-of-the-closet homosexual long before the closet opened, his plays explore the naked human heart. And the actors who play his leads are the most passionate, the most intense…and the most tormentedly handsome: Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Paul Newman in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof–and if you only know Paul Newman as an old grizzled guy in a recent TV film called Empire Falls, try him as the young husband who cannot sleep with his passionate wife because he’s tormented by the hint of a sexual relationship with a college buddy. Watch the repressed sexuality of Montgomery Clift in Suddenly Last Summer, which concerns a horror of homosexual carnage.

On the beach steps, an iguana is tethered, scampering to get away but caught at the end of its rope. So is the priest, played by the great Richard Burton–trapped, tethered between God and desire. The cross is still about his neck. When he cannot escape the seductive teen, he walks on broken glass, the pain unfelt under the anguish of his soul. But to me, the man trying to escape his emotional entrapment is second to the character played by Deborah Kerr, one of her great roles as the woman who understands the devils that plague a soul and the longings of a deviant man. Nothing in this world shocks her in a boat scene which I will not divulge…do yourself a major favor and watch the film.

I’m tempted to say, of all of the Tennessee Williams films, that they reveal the history of another social era, but there is something universal in torments of the soul grappling with love…all faces of love…love with veils removed…naked love…not the naked bodies of today’s “love” films, but the struggles of the naked soul to reach out and find happiness in a dangerous, difficult world.