The Night of the Iguana (MGM) (1964)

SCREEN’S ARRESTING NEW LOVE AFFAIR A passionately in love Sue Lyon embraces Richard Burton in this scene from ‘‘The Night of the Iguana, °°» explosive screen version of Tennessee Williams’ prize-winning play. Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr also star in the John Huston-Ray Stark production presented by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Seven Arts. Filmed on locations in Mexico, the much-talked-about picture was directed by Academy Award-winner John Huston, Still NOI-29 No living American playwright has contributed so importantly to the screen as has Tennessee Williams, whose “The Night of the Iguana,” voted the best play of the 1961-62 season by the New York Drama Critics, is the latest of his impressive list of dramatic hits to be made into a motion picture. A John Huston-Ray Stark production presented by Metro-GoldwynMayer and Seven Arts, “Iguana” was filmed on locations in Mexico with an all-star cast headed by Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and young Sue Lyon in her first role since “Lolita.” Although the screen play is the collaboration of Anthony Veiller and John Huston, with Huston also directing, Tennessee Williams visited the location company in the little fishing village of Mismaloya on the Pacific coast in order to make some changes in the role of the hotel proprietress, played by Miss Gardner, A perfectionist who is rarely satisfied with what he has done, the playwright felt he could improve the characterization as well as give it more sympathy. He arrived at the sunbaked little village carrying just one suitcase, an ancient typewriter and a Boston terrier called “Gigi,” and promptly explained why he hadn’t attempted to write the screen adaptation for “The Night of the Iguana.” “T’m a man of 52 now,” he said, “and in your late forties you come to realize that you must conserve your energies and concentrate only on those things which are most important to you. I wrote the screen plays for ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ “The Rose Tattoo’ and ‘Baby Doll’ and I have no regret about it. But now, once I’ve finished a play I would rather let someone else handle the movie treatment, particularly if it is someone whom I respect. Time is too precious. However, I do care what happens to my plays on the screen. That’s why I’m here now. I care very much.” Williams, who traces his ancestry on one side from pioneer Tennessee stock (although he himself was born in Columbus, Miss.) and on the other from the early settlers of Nantucket Island, has a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in his blood which may account for the conflicting impulses often represented in the people he writes about. It was in 1940, two years after he had received a B.A. degree from the University of Iowa, that Williams achieved his first real recognition by winning a Rockefeller fellowship and writing “Battle of Angels” which was produced by the Theatre Guild. It closed in Boston during the tryout run but he has re-written it sev 6 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS WATCHES “IGUANA” PROGRESS FROM HIT PLAY TO SCREEN Night of the Iguana Mat 2-A eral times and still has faith in it. Then, after working as an elevator operator, a waiter in Greenwich Village, a restaurant cashier in New Orleans and an usher at the Strand Theatre on Broadway, came the turning point. “From a seventeen-dollar-a-week job as a movie usher I was suddenly shipped off to Hollywood where MGM paid me $250 a week as a writer on the strength of my unsuccessful play. I saved enough money during my six months there to keep me while I wrote ‘The Glass Menagerie. The fates smiled at me this time, or maybe I should say Laurette Sue Lyon and famed playwright Tennessee Williams enjoy a laugh on the Mexican location of “The Night of the Iguana.” Night of the Iguana Still NOI-x-30 Mat 1-J Taylor, who played the leading role, smiled at me, for from that moment on I haven’t had to worry about where my next meal would come from.” Williams has never worked within the confines of a movie studio since, but the film companies have gobbled up his plays. MGM made highly successful pictures of “Cat ona Hot Tin Roof,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Period of Adjustment” prior to “The Night of the Iguana” and others of his works which have come to the screen in addition to those previously mentioned include “The Fugitive Kind” (based on “Orpheus Descending”), “Suddenly Last Summer,’ “Summer and Smoke” and “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” made from the only novel he has written. x « SUE LYON « « Having reached the ripe age of seventeen, Sue Lyon has left behind the heart-shaped sunglasses and lollipop of “Lolita,” the film which made her famous, to play a seductress in the John Huston — Ray Stark production, “The Night of the Iguana.” And the man in the case is none less than Richard Burton. Presented by Metro-GoldwynMayer and Seven Arts, this is the much-talked-about screen version of the Tennessee Williams play, which was voted the best play of the 196162 season by the New York Drama Critics. Filmed on locations in Mexico, largely in the isolated little fishing village of Mismaloya on the Pacific coast, the picture was directed by Academy Award winner Huston. Blonde, blue-eyed Miss Lyon finds herself in distinguished company in “The Night of the Iguana,” in which she not only plays dynamic love scenes with Burton but also faces the competition of such established actresses as Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. And this is only her second motion picture. All three women become romantically involved with Burton in Tennessee Williams’ sensuous story which revolves about a defrocked minister who, as a tourist guide, leads a group of schoolteachers on a trip in Mexico, but Miss Lyon, as the youngest of the tourists, gets there first. Although she is still a teenager, her role as Charlotte Goodall in “The Night of the Iguana” marks a more mature Sue Lyon in more ways than one. For one thing, she is no longer Miss Lyon in her private life. Shortly after the picture was completed, she became the bride of actor Hampton Fancher, III, who had been frequently at her side during the location filming in Mexico. “T’ve grown up and changed a few ideas and directions,’ Miss Lyon said. “I still want to be a very good actress but that’s not all anymore. I want to have children and when they are eight years old not have them say they hate me. If I can do that I will have done something worthwhile. If I don’t have four or five children who turn out to be good and happy people, I will have failed. At sixty you can have 90 cans of film and 10 Oscars in your cupboard but that’s no compensation at all if you lose out as a human being.” Perhaps the greatest experience she gained from working with highly successful professionals in “The Night of the Iguana” was an added poise and assurance. She relates an incident which occurred on the night before the company left Mexico City, where the first phase of “The Night of the Iguana” was filmed at the. Chorubusco Studios. “John Huston, Richard Burton, some of the other members of the company and I went to a party at the home of assistant director Emilio Fernandez, a stone fortress on the outskirts of town. I was tired and not dancing. Suddenly, Mr. Huston roared above the mariachi players, ‘Dance, Sue. Get up and dance.’ “T didn’t feel like doing a performance in front of these people, most of whom were strangers to me. But I didn’t hesitate. I just took off my shoes, stood up and did a spontaneous solo Twist. When I finished, Huston applauded and told me he didn’t think I had it in me. “You know why he made me dance, don’t you? He was testing me in front of those people. He was putting me on trial, I knew that if I didn’t get up and dance and give a good performance I’d have had it in his eyes. I think it was from that moment on that I stopped being afraid about anything.” MEET THE ELEVEN SCHOOLTEACHERS OF “NIGHT OF THE IGUANA” Director John Huston and playwright Tennessee Williams were sitting in a coffee shop at the Guadalajara airport during a brief stop en route to Mismaloya, Mexico, where Huston would film the screen version of Williams’ prize-winning Broadway play, “The Night of the Iguana.” The stars of the Huston — Ray Stark production, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Seven Arts, had already been signed. They were Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon. But the story of a defrocked minister who becomes a tourist guide and leads a party of schoolteachers on a trip through Mexico called for eleven players who, although not stars, play a vital part in the high-powered drama. These were the women who would portray the schoolteachers. “The sort of women I had in mind,” said Williams to Huston, “are exactly like that group over there.” He nodded toward a nearby table at which were seated eleven female tourists of indeterminate age. “That makes me feel a lot better,” the director replied, ‘because those are our eleven schoolteachers and they’re catching the same plane to our location. We found some of them on the Broadway stage, some in Hollywood’s television studios, and a few right here in Mexico. In fact, you know some of them.” Whereupon, he introduced Williams to the schoolma’ams. Now we will introduce you to them: Grayson Hall, who plays Judith Fellowes, described in the screen play of “The Night of the Iguana” as “self-appointed leader of the group,” is a Philadelphian, who majored in drama at Temple University. She previously appeared in a Williams play at the Hedgerow Theatre as Marguerite Gautier in ‘Camino Real.” Her most recent stage appearances on Broadway were in “Subways Are For Sleeping” and “The Balcony.” Her only previous film experience was in a featured FOR DEBORAH, THE PLAY’S THE THING role in “Satan in High Heels.” Gladys Hill was born in Williamson, West Virginia. Although she makes her acting debut in “The Night of the Iguana,” she is anything but a novice to show business, having first worked with John Huston in 1948 as his dialogue director. For many years she was Sam Spiegal’s assistant and since 1960 she has been Huston’s executive sercetary. Miss Hill is one of the world’s authorities on preColumbian sculpture and jewelry, and last year an exhibition of her own collection of Mexican Indian artifacts was held in Paris. Billy Matticks has never acted before and was discovered by Huston when he spotted her in a grocery store while she was vacationing in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. After reading for the part of Miss Throxton, teacher of business administration, the director decided she would be ideal. Miss Matticks decided a vacation “with pay” also would be ideal. Eloise Hardt, hailing from Lawton, Oklahoma, is well known to television audiences for her roles as Raymond Massey’s secretary in the “Dr. Kildare” series and as Dennis O’Keefe’s Girl Friday on the O’Keefe show. During the war years she toured the South Pacific with the Maurice Evans company and she claims that the South Sea islands have much in common with Mismaloya, the Mexican setting of “The Night of the Iguana.” Same coconut palms, same banana trees, same white sand and same land crabs! Mary Boylan was born in Plattsburgh, N. Y., and partnered David Wayne in his first Broadway play (it failed). She has appeared in virtually all the important television series in New York and whenever a part comes up calling for someone who looks like the late Eleanor Roosevelt, she gets it because of her uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Roosevelt. In “The Night of the Iguana” she plays Miss Peebles, described in the screen play as “a wisp of a woman whose subject is domestic science.” Dorothy Vance of Columbus, Ohio, is a bonafide schoolteacher who has been teaching modern languages for many years in North High, South High and Linden McKinley High in Columbus. Although her role is described as “another teacher,’ she has a speaking part. She has never Deborah Kerr’s lines in MetroGoldwyn-Mayer and Seven Arts’ “The Night of the Iguana” were written by Tennessee Williams, on whose prize-winning Broadway play the picture is based. But starring in screen adaptations of hit stage dramas is nothing new to the actress. In 1940, Miss Kerr made her motion picture debut in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara.” Among her 38 subsequent films were the screen versions of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,’ Robert Morley’s ‘Edward, My Son,” Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables,” Enid Bagnol’s “The Chalk Garden” and Robert Anderson’s “Tea and Sympathy.” In the last-named, Miss Kerr not only portrayed the heroine in MGM’s motion picture version but also scored in the role on the Broadway stage. had any previous acting experience. Bernice Starr is also a_ schoolteacher in real life. She worked for the Los Angeles City School System and until recently taught 6th Grade classes at Fair Haven School in North Hollywood. Barbara Joyce was born in Oakland, California, and was an actress on the New York stage for two decades prior to her retirement a year ago. Her last Broadway role was with Jessica Tandy in “Five Finger Exercise.” “The Night of the Iguana” marks her film debut. Thelda Victor, of Los Angeles, was working as assistant to the producer of Four Star Productions in Hollywood when Huston, visiting her boss, decided she would be just right for one of the schoolteachers, Betty Proctor is both a schoolteacher and an actress. Born in Elkhart, Indiana, she taught dramatics, history and English at Roosevelt Junior High there, while also working with the little theatre group. Liz Rubey’s Texan accent was heard by Huston while she was performing at the San Francisco night club, “the hungry i.” Although startled to learn that she was originally a Bostonian, he immediately signed her for one of the teachers in “The Night of the Iguana.” It is her first motion picture. Sareea Sue Lyon, of ‘Lolita’? fame, plays the young seductress, Charlotte, in ‘*The Night of the Iguana,” screen version of Tennessee Williams’ prize-winning play, in which she stars with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. The much-talked-about picture is a John Huston-Ray Stark production, presented by MetroGoldwyn-Mayer and Seven Arts, and directed by Huston. Night of the Iguana Still NOI-17 Mat 1-B