A few of Tennessee Williams' works were filmed in the Noir Style and they dealt with somewhat decadent dark subjects with hidden and sometimes not so hidden subtexts. They didn't deal with physical crime but with dark side of the human condition. They amount to Psychological Drama Noirs akin to In A Lonely Place (1950).
Classic Noir never really ended it just morphed into what we now call Neo Noir. It didn't happen all at once in one great kink, no it unraveled like the end of a rope into various strands. Some of these strand films on that cutting edge of Noir still retained the traces of those noir visual stylistics that I like to call the basic DNA of Noir. They are Transitional Noirs.
In Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Blanche causes her young husband to commit suicide. after discovering him with an older man, this in turn turns her into an alcoholic roundheels who screws everyone in town. In The Fugitive Kind (1960), Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, a guitar-playing drifter, shows up in a small-town dime store owned by Lady Torrance who is married to wife beater. He becomes the three way object of desire for an alcoholic nymphomaniac Carol Cutrere, Vee Talbott a housewife and Lady Torrance.
Night Of The Iguana is one of those sun baked noirs, set in the desert or tropical locations, a Film Soleil, a film of the sun. It deals with statutory rape, latent lesbianism, and multiple partner sex, how Noir is that? And, with the following characters, no less, a debauched de-frocked preacher operating as a Mexican tour guide, a blond teenage Lolita, a butch Baptist female college group leader, a dozen or so variations on your neighborhood "church lady." A hot to trot resort owner with two maraca shaking boy toys, a marijuana smoking Chinese cook, an "aww shucks" goober bus driver, a spinsterish, dried up, loveless woman with her nonagenarian grandfather in tow, who is "the oldest living poet," who scratches and hustles out a living as a water colorist and a sketch artist, grifting the tourists crowds, with gramps as part of the act giving recitations of his poems. They are vagabonds, quintessential "travelers" like two gypsies without a caravan. You got to hand it to him, Tennessee Williams had quite the imagination.
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| Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) |
Shannon: I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this angry, petulant old man in whom you believe. You've turned your backs on the God of love and compassion and invented for yourselves this cruel, senile, delinquent who blames the world and all that he created for his own faults! Close your windows. Close your doors! Close your hearts - against the truth of our God!
He basically chases them out of the pews and into the rain.
Two years pass. Shannon, is now scraping by running a low rent "Blake's Tours." He's guiding a group of Baptist schoolmarms about the byways of rural Mexico, stopping at adobe churches and souvenir tourist traps along the way. Shannon hits the sauce to get himself through the days. The groups shrill matriarch is Judith Fellows (Grayson Hall) and under her direct charge is her over-sexed seventeen year old niece Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon)
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| Charlotte (Sur Lyon) |
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| Shannon, Judith Fellows (Grayson Hall), Miss Peebles (Mary Boylan) |
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| Shannon, Hank (Skip Ward), Judith |
The bus, driving along a section of the coast has a blow out. Hank (Skip Ward) the diver has no spare tire and will have to remove the wheel and repair the inner tube. That gives Shannon a chance to slip away for a plunge in the sea. Charlotte sees him shucking off his clothes and she joins him. The visual reference for sex referenced here is obviously from From Here To Eternity.
Judith spots them both out in the Pacific and freaks, screaming her head off on the beach, standing in the wash. When Shannon and Charlotte finally swim to shore and come up the beach Judith confronts them.
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| You defied me. |
[she slaps Charlotte across the face; Charlotte exits]
Shannon: What did you think we were doing out there, Miss Fellowes? Spawning?
Judith: Oh, you beast. You beast! [sobbing] You beast!
That night at a hotel, Charlotte sneaks out of Judith's room, and into Shannon's. Charlotte is declaring her love for Shannon. Shannon is beside himself.
Shannon: The border I'm crossing over is the border of sanity.
When Judith discovers Charlotte gone she immediately runs to Shannon's room and finds them together. Judith incensed is now determined to get Shannon fired. The next day they are scheduled to be in Puerto Vallarta where Judith will be able to call Blaine's Tours.
Before they can check into their hotel Shannon commandeers the bus speeds through Puerta Vallarta and drives twenty further South to his personal "shangri la" the hotel Mismaloya.
Arriving at Mismaloya he grabs the bus's distributor head and runs up the hill to the hotel.
There he finds that his old buddy Fred has died and that Fred's widow Maxine (Ava Gardner) is running the place and cavorting about the lush landscapes in flagrante delicto with her dancing maraca shaking cabana boys. Stranded, Judith and the the women have no choice but to ascend the hill to the hotel.
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| Maxine (Ava Gardner) at Mismaloya |
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| Maxine's cabana boys Pepe (Fidelmar Durán) and Pedro (Roberto Leyva) |
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| Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and Hannah Jelks (Deborah Kerr) |
Noirsville
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| Beach Bartender (Emilio Fernández) |
This Film Soleil is in part one of those humorous ensemble Noirs. A black comedy that has its chuckle inducing moments, at times it seems that even Ava Gardner is cracking up at Burton's over the top, scenery chewing, degrading descriptions of Judith Fellows to Hank. Burton is in top form, in what is probably my favorite performance of his. He's fun to watch as he tries vainly to ward off Charlotte, verbally fences with Judith, castigates the lascivious Maxine for her dalliances with her maraca shaking cabana boys, and questions Hannah's incredible lonely life of chastity.
When during their conversation Hannah admits to Shannon that she has also survived a breakdown Shannon realizes that they are kindred spirits. The cure for madness is human connection, understanding, companionship. Tennessee Williams' authentic characters, with all their idiosyncrasies portray the universal struggle to find the meaning of one's life.
Night Of The Iguana was based on the 1961 play of the same name written by Tennessee Williams. Directed by John Huston (The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Misfits (1961)), cinematography was by Gabriel Figueroa, and the music was by Benjamin Frankel.
The rest of the cast aside the principals are Mary Boylan as Miss Peebles, the maraca shaking cabana boys were Fidelmar Durán as Pepe and Roberto Leyva as Pedro. Emilio Fernández (The Appaloosa (1966), The Wild Bunch (1969), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)) played the beach bartender, and C.G. Kim played Chang the cook.
All the performances are genuine, earthy, unforgettable. A true gem, made even more memorable for being shot in a once pristine paradise. 10/10.
While few class this as noir or neo-noir, it has some of the elements. Most notable are the alcoholic and easily seduced Episcopalian Priest in freefall, and the femme fatale slut that keeps throwing herself at him to spite her chaperone and rebel against being sent on the tour by her father to break up her relationship with a boy at home. The one aspect that probably pitches it out as noir for many is the denouement in which there is redemption versus complete destruction. It's not in my list of noir in my film library, but that wasn't a simple decision as it is very borderline. Nevertheless, it's a great movie. I was shocked when watching it the first time with its themes and subject material that were allowed by the MPAA's Production Code censors using the Hays Code. Only a few years earlier it would have been eviscerated and castrated by the censors, and probably not produced. It is the reason the "sex" aspect was left completely ambiguous in some scenes and completely downplayed in others. A man and woman not married to each other having sex was absolutely forbidden under the Hays Code as completely immoral. That they got away with the hotel owner Maxine obviously (from the dialog) being serviced by her cabana boys has me amazed, as does the dialog in which Shannon refers to the chaperone Judith as a dyke, a homosexual pejorative. While watching it I had to keep in mind it was prior to the MPAA rating system in November 1968, and the effective demise of the Hays Code censorship circa 1967 as Valenti developed the new system.
ReplyDeleteI go with the original coinage of the term by French right wing and religious publications in the mid 1930's. Any film that was against the laws of the state or deemed morally depraved was condemned as Films Noir. Pretty simple and straight forward and saves a lot of argument. There are an awful lot of Hollywood Noir that in the last two minutes have a "denouement in which there is redemption versus complete destruction."
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