The Night of the Iguana
Starring: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr
Director: John Huston
The film: In 1963, the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta was a sleepy backwater with no regular air links and no tourism industry to speak of. That year, director John Huston arrived with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr to shoot The Night of the Iguana. Burton had Elizabeth Taylor in tow so the paparazzi followed. Thanks to the publicity and the film's attractive location shots, Puerto Vallarta is today Mexico's second-most popular holiday destination (after Cancun), and receives about 1.5 million tourists a year.
Based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name, The Night of the Iguana was mostly filmed along the coast from Puerto Vallarta in the isolated village of Mismaloya, where the derelict film set is still a tourist attraction. Burton's character, a defrocked clergyman now working as a tour guide, arrives with a busload of middle-aged American women, hoping to install them in his friend's clifftop hotel. But the friend has died, leaving his wife (Gardner) to rescue Burton from a rapidly approaching nervous breakdown.
Just before their arrival he was caught with the group's only young girl (played by 17-year-old Sue Lyon, who two years earlier had the title role in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita) in his hotel room, and her chaperone is charging him with statutory rape and is trying to get him fired.