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 to miss the point. The 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
helpless and hopeless about them—it fails to generate the sympathy and
the
personal compassion that might make their suffering meaningful.
I have to agree that for a man in such an "unstable condition"
as the ex-Episcopal priest Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) describes
his situation (he has only recently recovered from a nervous breakdown), the
once handsome Welsh orator doesn't sound like he's so shaky. The spinsterish
artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) is so lovely to both listen to and look at
that it is neigh impossible to comprehend why her only brush with sex was with
an elderly man who requested an article of her clothing. And the gutsy and
raunchy hotel owner, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner), dancing and drinking out the
day with her cabana boys, certainly doesn't seem to be on the edge. But that's
just the point. As Shannon tells Hannah "The Fantastic Level and the Realistic
Level are the two levels upon which we live." And clearly for much of this
hot-house concoction the characters exist on the Fantastic Level, pouring out
their inner fears and desires to anyone who might hear them out.
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 an 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 a 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 trying 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 defied 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."
Both Shannon and Hannah share a view of the world that is quite
all-encompassing. As Hannah explains: "Nothing disgusts me, Mr. Shannon,
unless it's unkind, violent." Shannon decries "man's inhumanity to
God," a statement I interpreted as admonishing religious believers for
forgetting that God, as Christ, lived life as a frail and sometimes erring man.
We are not gods but humans in need of forgiveness. And what links them,
strangely, is their chastity, their commitment to their vocation, she to her
art and her father's poetry, he to the church, despite his having been
"locked out" for a supposed sexual tryst with a Sunday School teacher
("kneeling led to reclining"). And despite her seemingly
hard-drinking and sexually-craved personae, Maxine is at work's end willing to
leave her hotel to the management of the spiritually soothing
It is the legion of travelers—which in
Williams' original play included a group of Nazi tourists—who are truly
immoral, all being people who believe fervently in their righteousness. Like an
army, they are internally on the move, destroying nearly everything that
crosses their paths, leaving the lame, the panicked, and the dead—Nonno dies
mercifully after completing his poem—in their wake.
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
Reprinted from International
Cinema Review (June 2012).
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