As part of the Hollywood classics series, this Saturday, September 12, at 6:00 PM, the “Marco Lugo” Cinematógrafo at the Municipal Center for the Arts (CMA) will present John Huston’s *The Night of the Iguana* (1964). The film tells a story defined by desire, loneliness, frustration, and the need to find meaning in one’s life.
Featuring a stellar cast that included Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr, the film received several Oscar nominations—including Best Supporting Actress for Grayson Hall, as well as Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography for the Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa—and won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design.
It also garnered multiple Golden Globe nominations, with Ava Gardner recognized for her performance. At the San Sebastián Film Festival, Gardner won the award for Best Actress.
Richard Burton plays the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, a clergyman who has lost his stability and works as a tour guide in Mexico. During a trip, he leads a group of American women to a small town on the coast of Jalisco. There, he meets Maxine Faulk, a widow who runs a hotel, and Hannah Jelkes, a traveling artist who makes a living drawing portraits. A complex web of desires, memories, frustrations, and contradictions begins to unfold among them.
Filmed in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, the movie makes the landscape a fundamental part of its atmosphere; the heat, vegetation, and isolation serve as extensions of the characters’ emotional states.
Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography is particularly remarkable; the Mexican landscape ceases to be a mere backdrop and takes on a dramatic presence of its own.
More than just a romance, *The Night of the Iguana* is a film about people trying to escape what haunts them. In Tennessee Williams’s text, Huston finds a story of desire, guilt, aging, and the need for affection, brought to life by an extraordinary cast. Admission is free but limited by capacity; the film will be screened in its original language (English) with Spanish subtitles. Doors to the Cinematógrafo will open 20 minutes before the start time, with entry via the CMA main entrance on Carnaval Street, opposite Plazuela Machado.
