The Night of the Iguana (1964)
Movie · 1964 · Drama, Romance · 1h 58m · NR · English
Curator score: 6.6/10 (23.7K ratings)
One man... three women... one night
Overview
A defrocked Episcopal clergyman leads a bus-load of middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failure haunting his life.
Ratings
- Curator score: 6.6/10
- IMDb: 7.5/10
- Letterboxd: 3.73/5
- Rotten Tomatoes: 75%
- TMDB: 7.2/10
Director
John Huston
Production
Seven Arts Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Cast
Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Skip Ward, Grayson Hall, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan, Gladys Hill, Emilio Fernández, Eloise Hardt
Curator Review
Verdict
A steamy, melancholy Tennessee Williams adaptation with strong performances, moral exhaustion, and a vivid sense of place. It’s especially rewarding if you like character-driven dramas where desire, shame, and grace collide in the open air.
Best for
- fans of Tennessee Williams adaptations
- viewers who like emotionally raw prestige dramas
- people drawn to late-classical Hollywood performances
- audiences interested in spiritual crisis and romantic tension
- fans of sun-baked, talky chamber dramas
Skip if
- you want a fast-moving plot
- you dislike stage-originated dialogue-heavy films
- you prefer subtle understatement over heightened emotion
- you are put off by mid-century sexual politics and melodrama
Overview
John Huston turns Tennessee Williams’ brittle, feverish play into a humid study of collapse and survival. The film is less about plot than pressure: a disgraced cleric, a hotel full of stranded personalities, and a coastal setting that seems to erode everyone’s defenses. Richard Burton gives the central role a bruised, self-lacerating energy that keeps the film alive even when it feels theatrically boxed in.
Worth noting
What lingers most is the film’s empathy for damaged people who can’t quite stop hurting themselves. Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr are both excellent in contrasting modes: one earthy and pragmatic, the other calm, self-possessed, and quietly radical. Huston lets the movie breathe in long conversations, but he also gives it a restless sensuality that makes the emotional weather feel physical.
Bottom line
It can feel stage-bound at times, and its gender politics are very much of its era, but the performances and atmosphere are potent enough to outweigh that. If you respond to adult melodrama with spiritual undertones, this is one of the more memorable examples of the form.
Top Letterboxd reviews
theriverjordan (5★) · 271 likes
Broken souls shatter inside bodies, and cut insides apart with their glassy shards in “The Night of the Iguana.” John Huston’s adaption of the Tennessee Williams play possesses a deep empathy amidst its depiction of man’s capacity for self-cruelty. Richard Burton stars as a shunned alcoholic priest turned tour guide. Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr enter into the plot, not as the figurative angel and demon on his shoulders, but as two women with vastly different methods to cope with… more
Daniel (4.5★) · 140 likes
"Well, she's done a pretty good job of destroying you!""Maxine, don't rob me of the credit for my own small accomplishments." Clergyman Dr. T. Laurence Shannon (Richard Burton) suffers a nervous breakdown and is being defrocked by the church. Two years later, an alcoholic Shannon works as a tour guide in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, showing around a group of Baptist schoolteachers while trying to fend of man-crazy 16-year-old Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon). When Charlotte's chaperone catches the girl with… more
spap1 (4.5★) · 133 likes
where is there to go from here? the clouds float by wistfully into the waves, merging, merging and lost. i wish i could watch them go, but my eyes, they sear with pain, they ache with desire to follow the course, to revert back to the world that opens its heart to me. it wishes warmth, it washes the worst off of my dirtied skin, destroyed from the tears gone by. but it doesn’t protect me. it doesn’t protect me… more
Josh Gillam (3.5★) · 106 likes
Disgraced former priest Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) attempts to start over as a tour guide in Mexico, but when an accusation sends his new life spinning he seeks out an old friend to get himself together and gradually unravels over the course of a night, in John Huston’s drama based on Tennessee Williams’ play and co-starring Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon and Grayson Hall. Like his work in The Misfits a few years earlier, Huston shows an interest in… more
DirkH (5★) · 104 likes
"Nothing human disgusts me Mr. Shannon, unless it's unkind or violent" This film is incredible and I watched it by accident. I wasn't planning on watching a film but chanced upon this one on TV and just couldn't stop watching. This has mainly to do with mesmerizing performances by Burton and Gardner, they suck you into the story and really make you care about them. This is a film about being human, warts and all. The characters that populate the Mexican hotel in this film are beautiful, ugly, selfish, angry, happy, depressed; they are human and their interactions are a wonder to behold. Absolutely fantastic.
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Topics
Tennessee Williams adaptation, psychological drama, romantic melodrama, hot-weather atmosphere, ensemble acting, mid-century Hollywood, spiritual turmoil, character study, sweaty Southern Gothic, theatrical drama