Along the Welsh coast lies a village called Llareggub - or "bugger all" backwards - which is peopled with eccentrics like Captain Cat (Peter O'Toole), a seafaring man who is losing his sight; the sexy Rosie Probert (Elizabeth Taylor); and Mr. Waldo (Ray Smith), a jack-of-all-trades who is full of regret. The story is told by Richard Burton's character.
The film was shot primarily on location in Wales and has since acquired a reputation among aficionados as a cult movie.[3] "The film, beautifully photographed and spoken, casts the brooding spell of Thomas’ verse in its reconstruction of the seaside village and the daily round of its inhabitants", wrote Andrew Sinclair in the International Herald Tribune.[3]
The filming took place in Lower Town, Fishguard, Wales.[4] The choice of location caused protest from some in Laugharne, the town forty miles away (60 km) where Thomas had written the play; an official there said, "To film Under Milk Wood anywhere but Laugharne would be as absurd as filming James Joyce's The Dubliners in Birmingham."[5]
It is hard to know what to say about a film of Under Milk Wood except that there is really only one way it could turn out, and that is precisely the way this one does. The enterprise is, after all, doomed from the outset by the nature of the original material. The essence of Dylan Thomas's classic radio play was, necessarily, its use of words, of word-painting to evoke with intense vividness all that, in the nature of things, we could not see.[6]
Taylor concluded that "the final effect is to leave one wondering what, precisely, is the point of the exercise".[6]
What Sinclair has done is to transpose the piece virtually line by line into visuals, so that if Thomas talks about the sea we see it, if he mentions love then we watch an approximation of it on the screen. ... Perhaps the cinema is simply the wrong medium. Even so, there is another way other than mere duplication. What the camera could have done was to sing its own song of praise, almost as a commentator, a second poet. A freer adaptation might have risked raising more eyebrows; but it surely would have shut fewer eyes.[7]
Legacy
In December 2012 the director of the film, Andrew Sinclair, gave the film rights to the people of Wales.[8]
^ abChapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press p 357. Income is distributor's receipts, combined domestic and international, as at 31 Dec 1978)
