Cinema: Imaginary People, Real Hearts

The Night of the Iguana. All horseplay and no headwork, the gossips sneered, will surely make John a dull picture. But Director Huston (Freud), as often before, has saucily tweaked the bluenoses. In ten wild weeks at a sunny place for shady people on Mexico's spectacular west coast, Huston and company put together a picture that excites the senses, persuades the mind, and even occasionally speaks to the spirit—one of the best movies ever made from a Tennessee Williams play.

Yes, there's a send-'em-home-happy ending, but otherwise the script is admirably loyal to the play. It sets the same scene: a rundown resort hotel in Mexico. It presents the same persons: the rampant tramp (Ava Gardner) who keeps the hotel for business and a couple of beach boys for pleasure; a renegade reverend (Richard Burton) expelled from his parish in Virginia for rutting in the rectory; a roundheeled teen-ager (Sue Lyon) who wishes she had been there; a peripatetic painter (Deborah Kerr) who sketches for her supper.

The script tells the same story the play told, though it isn't much of a story. The characters for the most part simply talk on the terrace, and as they talk they reveal and heal themselves. Fascinating, sometimes. But sometimes rather tiresomely reminiscent of group therapy—especially when Analyst Williams, who has become a bit sententious in middle age, clears his throat and weighs in with a brave banality: "A home is something two people have between them. Any light is a good light to see by."

The fault is important but not dominant. Williams can horselaugh as well as harrumph, and it's an absolute delight to watch the most perverse of playwrights tell a tale in which the nadir of naughtiness is attained by a man with a harmless though peculiar passion for ladies' underwear. Huston, what's more keeps Iguana scuttling along at a right smart rate, and as always he shrewdly challenges his actors with delegated creativity. They all respond. Kerr lends charm and finesse to a meaching masochist. As for Burton, he makes more sense in this movie than he has in his last half-dozen efforts. He has a light in his eye, a line to his mouth, and the carriage of a man who believes in what he is doing.

It isn't hard to. Williams, though he often seems obsessed with other vital centers, is fundamentally concerned with the heart, and in Iguana he sometimes writes about it beautifully. His characters are contraptions and their lives are theatrical tropes, but when they say what they feel, what hurts them and what they long for, they come suddenly alive and bleeding. Strange and disturbing to see contraptions bleed.