man's inhumanity to god
by Douglas Messerli
John
Huston and Anthony Veiller (based on the play by Tennessee Williams), John
Huston (director) The Night of the
Iguana / 1964
The more I see of Tennessee Williams'
plays and the films based upon them, the more I perceive that his strongest
works are often the least taut and structured. These days I much prefer the
kind of wandering and wondering mazes of unrelated phrases and perspiringly
panicked figures than the orderly march of the comic matron of The Glass Menagerie. Any attempt to
contain Williams' sprawling wordfests, as in Brooks' cinematic adaptations of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, results in a
kind clinical imprisonment of the characters, as, in their babbling
confessions, they become locked up in themselves. Williams, as I have suggested
again and again, is not a successful realist, and to tie any work of his to
real life is miss the point. New York
Times critic Brosley Crowther did precisely that in his review when the
film premiered:
Since difficulty of communication between individuals seems to be
one of the sadder of human misfortunes that Tennessee Williams is
writing about in his play, "The Night of the Iguana," it is ironical that the
film John Huston has made from it has difficulty in communicating, too.
At least, it has
difficulty in communicating precisely what it is that is so
barren and poignant about the
people it brings to a tourist hotel run
by a sensual American woman on
the west coast of Mexico. And because
it does have difficulty—because it doesn't really make you see what is so
it does have difficulty—because it doesn't really make you see what is so
helpless and hopeless about
them—it fails to generate the sympathy and
the personal compassion that
might make their suffering meaningful.
Moreover, for the long night
ahead at the dilapidated Mexican hotel to which Shannon has run, the four most
fantastic figures—Shannon, Maxine, Hannah, and her poet father, Nonno (Cyril
Delevanti)—must face a entire bevy of real world literalists, determined to put
an end to their absurd existences. The very idea that such exaggerated figures
should have to rub up with a whole busload of female singing Baptist tourists,
headed by an hysteric moralist such as Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall) aboard to
chaperone the sexually "precocious" Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon) is
nearly preposterous. But what fun!
Part of the great joy in this film is the comic explosion when a truly
moral man, formerly of the church, rubs up against a pack of wolves desperate—in
the young girl's case—to get him into bed or—in the case of the elder tourists—to
discover him in that bed and torture him to death. The great guffaw of
Williams' underrated work arises from the fact that all the self-proclaimed
moralists of the film see sex everywhere, while the morally "unfit"
live relatively chaste lives. Shannon has, after all, not run away to this run-down
Mexican retreat to meet up with Maxine as much as to be mysteriously "cured"
by her former husband, Fred, a man who apparently had little to do with her
sexually ("He lost interest," Maxine notes), preferring to spend most
of his time "fishing," another word, one suspects, for
"cruising." Shannon, in fact, seems quite fearful of and resistant to
women. After attempting to "swim to China," an attempt at suicide,
Shannon, bound and tied to a hammock, responds to Hannah:
I thought
you were sexless. But you've just become a
woman. And
do you know how I know that? Because
"you" like "me" tied up! All women, whether they
wish
to admit
it or not, would like to get men into a tied-up
situation.
Hannah has not even had sex. Maxine spends more time dancing with her
cabana boys than snuggling up to their bodies.
On the other hand, the singing teacher harridan, Judith (tagged by the
fantasists as a closeted lesbian) perceives nearly any motion as a sexual act. When
her young charge swims out to join Shannon taking a dip in the ocean to get out
of the blistering sun, she slaps the girl across her face:
Judith Fellowes: Dreadful
girl. You defined me. You "deliberately"
defied me.
T. Lawrence Shannon: What
did you think we were doing out there,
Miss Fellowes? Spawning?
As Shannon summarizes her condition:
"Miss Fellowes is a highly moral person. If she ever recognized the truth
about herself it would destroy her."

At work's end, Shannon remains with Maxine, the only aspect of Huston's
film I find somewhat unbelievable. Doubtlessly, he will also spend most of his
time, now that he has abandoned his religious restraints, "fishing"
like Maxine's Fred.
Los Angeles, June
24, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment