The Night of the Iguana

Films of Tennessee Williams' plays now often look very artificial and overwrought, but with this Huston came up with one of the best. Williams is treated with respect rather than reverence, and Huston injects his own sly humour. The film, which perambulates around Burton as the clergyman turned travel courier after a sex scandal, and the effects of his various crises of faith on the coachload of women teachers he is escorting (with assorted provocations from Lyon's nymphet, Gardner's blowsy hotel proprietor, Kerr's artist) is all the more interesting in the light of Wise Blood, Huston's later descent into the maelstrom of religious obsessions.