This is a Festival review of Under Milk Wood (1971) plus director Q&A
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16 September
This is a Festival review of Under Milk Wood (1971) plus director Q&A
Under Milk Wood (1971*) twice screened as part of Cambridge Film Festival’s / #CamFF 2014’s Dylan Thomas 100 strand : this is an account of the screening in Screen 1 at 6.30 p.m. on Monday 1 September 2014, followed by a Q&A with its director and screenwriter, Andrew Sinclair
Wikipedia® reports that the famous Richard Burton radio production, broadcast on The Third Programme on the BBC on 25 January 1954, was incomplete, because ‘two sections’ (unspecified) had been omitted – Douglas Cleverdon, its producer, revisited the play in 1963, and it was broadcast in its entirety on 11 October.
Andrew Sinclair turns Under Milk Wood into a film, and we get (Drama on 3, Dylan Thomas: The Beach of Falesa) an unshotscreenplay on radio.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2014Apparently, Andrew Sinclair’s film (his screenplay and direction) came nearly twenty years after both an incidentally recorded reading – the only one with Dylan Thomas (as First Voice (and Eli Jenkins)) – on 14 May 1953, and Thomas’ death (on 9 November 1953) :
At @camfilmfest, was Andrew Sinclair's film Under Milk Wood (1972) strange - but strange #NotInAGoodWay (and maybe better just as voices) ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 16, 2014The strangeness is partly there from Richard Burton and Ryan Davies (as, respectively, First and Second Man), not least what they get up to in a shed that they go into : one does not doubt that Jack Toye (@jackabuss) is right that Thomas lost his virginity thus – but these are men not normally of an age to be having their first sexual experience ? (Unless, of course, we look beyond their age, and imagine their occasional high jinks to be re-living their youth ?)
In any case, even though it happened – with Thomas ‘sharing his partner’ (as one might have called it in the 1950s) with the other man – of what great relevance was this element of biography to the text of Under Milk Wood ? Except, of course, that Thomas gives us his fictional Llareggub awash with sex, sexual fantasy and desire (no doubt why there were two cuts in 1954 ?)…
Yet somehow, that seems an insufficient reason to introduce this particular ‘stage-business’ for First and Second Man (though, clearly, they have to be doing something**) – quite apart from what it suggests about whoever the woman is (not easily identifiable from IMDb’s cast-credits), and the role and self-determination of women, that Burton and Davies can just oblige her to divert her from her path, and down to the cliffs, in the first place. For there seems to be enough actual or latent passion as it is, without interpolating more, because, needless maybe to say, sometimes more is less.
Somehow, also, one is thrown back to infidelity and attraction in The Edge of Love (2008), which – whatever its merits or rootedness in fact – shows an ease of relations, and what, at worst, they can give rise to : jealousy, anger, and violence. Yet we also have what is in the centre here, that ‘ease’ repeatedly giving way to multiple relationships, whether the ‘marriage beyond death’ of Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard (Siân Phillips) or the various desires, lusts and even adultery of the others.
In Thomas’ text, we have the extremes of this film that featured him (please see above), with Vivien Merchant (Mrs Pugh) humiliating / emasculating her husband (Talfryn Thomas), but risking his revenge, and the disgust and disdain with and in which Polly Garter (Ann Beach) is held for her promiscuity (and, just as relevantly, her fecundity) : with Polly, one feels that Thomas’ heart lies, as it seems to do (in other ways and amongst others), and with the youthful attractiveness of Gossamer Beynon** (Angharad Rees) – see the comment on The Wicker Man (1973), below.
Likewise, the seemingly well-suited couple (amongst so many mismatches) of Cherry Owen (Glynn Edwards) and Mrs Cherry Owen (Bridget Turner), and even Captain Cat’s (Peter O’Toole’s) solitary, but content, world amongst the sounds from which he conjures up pictures of life – as Thomas, his creator, himself does, whether boomingly delivering ‘Fern Hill’, or here, in this play.
However, the question is – as famously with the play within Willy Russell’s original play of Educating Rita (1983) – simply put : Since this is a Play for Voices, why do we need what Sinclair has done with it, converting it into a film ? And, moreover, do we need him effectively undermining his own screening by being too candid about (not to list everything) :
* Telling us at which times of day – on account of sobriety – he could rely on Richard Burton to do various things on the shoot :
We also heard some of this from Roland Klick at the Festival in 2013, regarding Dennis Hopper, cocaine, and the making of White Star (1983), but Klick seemed to inform Hopper’s performance by what he told us, because how he told it was more germane…)
* Likewise with Elizabeth Taylor (and Sinclair’s having to have her as part – as it were – of the package, so letting her be as Rosie Probert), but bitching about her Cleopatra make-up, her behaviour on set, etc.
* Cast who came to Sinclair as part of the funding deal, when maybe it gives a better impression of artistic unity and purpose at least to be silent about such matters (unless asked), rather than glaringly seeking to be truthful that it had to be accepted, whatever the drawbacks
* Even, perhaps, drawing attention to the fact that Burton does not speak a word on screen (and it was recorded separately) – what maintains the magic of cinema better… ?
Yet, on some sort of fantasy level, Sinclair talks up Thomas’ work – which, as a champion of it when he was a fellow in Cambridge, he necessarily would – and also how easily the text (which has been analysed here by another) fitted with the talented actors (i.e. those who were not just, not in his words, ‘along for the ride’) : afterwards, Sinclair told The Agent (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) that the tempo to which, in the extended passages, the actors naturally inclined had never been at variance with his own vision for the delivery.
Maybe so, but we wonder how easily Sinclair persuaded women to wear costumes so diaphanous as to be transparent, or Rees to recede with a naked back – in a sequence that took us out of the already concentratedly odd (as if the Welshness that Thomas wants to share with the world is distilled eccentricity ?) into unreality : and maybe Sinclair’s film was influential on the significantly more interesting vision of Anthony Shaffer in his screenplay for The Wicker Man (1973), with Gossamer a precursor to the likes of Britt Ekland (as Willow) on a less furtive coastline ? Also a film where director Robert Hardy gives much more sense of being on a coast and of the sea (even if Under Milk Wood was filmed in and around Fishguard, Pembrokeshire) ?
Sinclair’s film starts and finishes with the sky at night-time, seen through branches as the camera moves onwards. Later, whether through the lack of budgetary or other resources, the night that Burton and Davies describe does not always resemble that pitch quality (again, Sinclair was not asked why it looks less like coal black than dawn – or brighter – before we even get to dawn).
Further on, it does not seem to be the real O’Toole looking out to the waves (if Captain Cat could see) from his vessel atop a building, but rather resembles a mannequin, and the film (even if it appears to match the length of the play) feels substantially over its length for its content – however much Sinclair has invented for his cast to do...
Which is maybe the problem, namely that this depiction is overly visual, often literal (despite the moments of unreality), an approach that draws attention to the fact that what one most wants to take from Under Milk Wood is Thomas’ words.
So what was the point of that Drama on 3 ? To get Dylan Thomas' screenplay made, @BBCRadio3blog - or to make it seem unnecessary ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2014
22:00 Drama on 3: Adaptation of an unfilmedscreenplay by Dylan Thomas set on a Pacific island. http://t.co/SBvm9OqZuq
— On BBC Radio 3 Now (@onradio3now) October 26, 2014
Yet it is, after all, quite nice to learn this (also from Wikipedia®) :
In December 2012 the director of the film, Andrew Sinclair, gave its rights to the people of Wales.
If so, maybe the nicest thought about the film was not mentioned in the Q&A…
End-notes
* Yet IMDb says 1972 (and, crucially, it says 87 mins, #CamFF 88 mins) – and never to be confused with Under Milk Wood (2014)…
** If, that is, they need to be embodied at all, and not just voiced over – a topic that did not appear to be canvassed in the initial part of the Q&A.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
