John Huston completism (he directed), and for Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) who plays a dipso erstwhile British Navy commander-turned-diplomat in Mexico on their Day of the Dead, 1938. Guy Gallo adapted Malcolm Lowry's novel.
The scene somewhat echoes, or perhaps brackets, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1957): the next war is in the pipe while the previous one, still fresh in the mind, is tamed with oceans of booze. Finney's brother Anthony Andrews was reporting on the Spanish Civil War, again echoing Hemingway. For reasons incompletely presented wife Jacqueline Bisset decides to undivorce Finney despite having dallied with the brother. There is a beautiful cat that is blamed for howling all night, and a bullfight.
The plot is barely there. The themes are mostly to do with making permanent what others may try to undo. Finney is quite fine in Richard Burton mode but to no ultimate end. The Night of the Iguana (1964) it is not.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Huston mostly omitted the politics ("the political disintegration of Mexico in the face of the rising tide of Nazism"). IMDB trivia: Burton declined to appear. Janet Maslin made it a Critic's Pick. Vincent Canby.
