The Night of the Iguana

“Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control,” a conflicted priest reminds himself at the start of this hothouse melodrama. Huston assembled a near-flawless cast to bring Tennessee Williams’s 1961 play to the screen: Richard Burton as a reverend thrown out of his parish for sexual misconduct and sent into exile as a tour guide in Mexico; Sue Lyon as a young woman whose advances further threaten his position; Deborah Kerr as a repressed traveler with whom he fatefully crosses paths; and the great Ava Gardner as the proprietress of the run-down hotel where the characters spends much of the film chipping away at one another’s defenses.