Thursday, May 21, 2009

Night of the Iguana

Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr   d/ John Huston

Taken from a novel by Tennessee Williams, this is widely regarded as Huston's worst movie and I concur. Asinine, sometimes cartoonish... Burton never plugged into his character...always seemed to be reading lines. For the first hour I was constantly irritated, after that sadly resigned to watching this junk till the end.

The big revelation to me was that Ava couldn't act at all...her body language was clumsy and awkward, her line readings amateurish. I guess they thought in those bygone days that if a girl was pretty enough stick her in front of a camera and hope for the best. Here (1964) she had lost her beauty and came across as an aging hack in a local theater company.

I thought this was really terrible. Did see Mapache, though.

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