The publicity around the shooting of The Night of the Iguana, with its giant cast in tiny Puerto Vallarta and tinier Mismaloya, Mexico, was itself legendary. Despite the margaritas, Richard Burton turned in a magnificent performance as Tennessee Williams’s Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, minister to his own passions, living a “comparatively comfortable, even voluptuous crucifixion” as a tour guide to repressed Baptist ladies from Texas. Ava Gardner’s cackling longing out-Lizes the off-screen Liz. But it is in Deborah Kerr’s prim godliness that Shannon recognizes his opposite self, the one lost to maleness. The Reverend knows when he’s been frocked. Gabriel Figueroa uses deep focus to find icons in Mexicans and caricatures in Americans; the one, a glimpse into “a lost world of innocence,” the other, the fantastic within the real, the thing that has Shannon spooked.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Huston, Anthony Veiller, based on the play by Tennessee Williams. Photographed by Gabriel Figueroa. With Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon. (118 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)