Verse and Worse

...Miss Taylor wears enough eye shadow on each lid to shame the dome of Sultan Ahmet's renowned Blue Mosque, and is altogether gotten up to look like Zinka Milanov trying to play Tinker Bell...

...it does not convey, as the more evanescent radio play does, our little life as shrouded with a sleep...

...Montand becomes violent and destructive, Frey melancholy and self-effacing, Romy more and more withdrawn and unhappy...

...even in a bread-and-butter note he would write of being "miraculously home again now in this tumbling house whose every broken pane and wind-whipped-off slate, child-scrawled wall, rain-stain, mouse-hole, knobble and ricket, man, man-booby-and-rat-trap, I know in my sleep...

...Sinclair correctly perceived that, on film, these narrators had to become physical presences, and so made them into two wanderers, former Llareg-gubians, who return to the town in the morning, rove, booze, mingle, wench, and comment about everyone and everything until, at nightfall, they depart again...

...Both the poetics and the acrobatics would lose out to the overall wonderment, though the greater loser, surely, would be the poetry...

...It is meant to recreate a day in the life of this village, a day in the life of this world, by means of voices emerging from a dark silence, then returning into the silent darkness...

...The two narrators proceed to penetrate this pants suit in the course of a mini-orgy that clashes stylistically with the general tone...

...Burton, moreover, gives us his by now standard performance: an expression of vaguely suffering, congealed remoteness, and a voice that resonates like a moody, muffled trumpet played by an absent-minded musician...

...But there is no more reason for us to care about how these three ciphers will rearrange themselves than about watching a man work out anagrams for a three-letter word...

...That is why to make a movie out of Under Milk Wood, a sort of radio play by Dylan Thomas, the most lyrical and bardic of bards, was to court failure...

...You create verbal-visual unison, or you create counterpoint...

...It looks as if she is going to settle down to a job in another town, while the two men, now warm friends, begin to keep house together, united by their lost love...

...Finally, Montand sets up a menage a trois that Romy rejects...

...But he has not succeeded in integrating them perfectly and, worse yet, he gets them involved with a young woman who looks like a higher type of London secretary, complete with pants suit...

...Romy Schneider, a more or less idly rich divorcee and mother, is torn between a jolly but somewhat coarse-grained tycoon, Yves Montand, and a younger, more artistic but also less rich, cartoonist, Sami Frey...

...The other avoidable major error, but this one only seemingly avoidable, was the deadly casting of Elizabeth Taylor as Rosie Probert, old blind Captain Cat's dead sweetheart, a girl of easy virtue yet difficult to forget...

...Still, for all the pleasures the film provides, not the least being the unspoiled coastal village of Fishguard, lovingly explored and caressed by the camera, the basic problem remains...

...The film does not hark back to the incomparably more accomplished Jules and Jim, as has been suggested, but to those cliche-ridden French boulevard farces, as well as to the muddy boulevard love dramas that men like Henri Bataille and Henry Bernstein used to churn out with depressing regularity during the early decades of this century...

...Something analogous happens even with the third and best method, where word and image function in close harmony, similar yet dissimilar and, ostensibly, reinforcing each other...

...The biggest flaw is the handling of the two narrators Thomas wrote into his radio play two because the BBC, to avoid monotony, tended to provide a pair of alternating voices for its political and cultural broadcasts...

...It evokes a typical day in the life of a tiny Welsh coastal town, Llareggub (really Thomas' own Laugharne), but the quint essentially Welsh-sounding name is actually "bugger all" spelled backward...

...In a similar put-on...

...For him this was not only what the device usually means painting with sound, something like "the murmur of innumerable bees," where you are meant to hear the buzz of the insects...

...It is wrong to single out anyone in such a tactfully directed, tightly-knit ensemble, but I cannot resist calling your attention to Meg Wynn Owen as Lily Smalls...

...and Sinclair's direction is...

...But just try to put this on film...

...Cesar and Rosalie is highfalutin trash, admirably summed up by the German term Edelkitsch...

...It was a magisterial orchestration of vowels, consonants and syllables into rapturous bundles of words that tripped or thundered off the tongue, frolicked or fulminated across the palate, to issue as something both waterfall and symphonic orchestra...

...It is to the credit of Andrew Sinclair, who adapted the work for the screen and directed it, that he meticulously preserved both aspects, the Rabelaisian and the neo-Swinburnian...

...The word is supposed to have come to Thomas when an importunate host...

...Here one becomes so fascinated by the cunning interaction of sight and sound that the virtuoso interplay largely overshadows both the poetry and the spectacle...

...She cares for both of them in different ways, and so shuttles helplessly between them...

...There are a few avoidable lapses in Sinclair's film...

...And so it is in the movie Under Milk Wood, an honorable failure, a truly beautiful loser...

...Thomas exuded poetry...

...I have never admired Burton's readings of Thomas all that much: Compared to Dylan's own, they are an overinflated second best?though, to be sure, nothing comparable in overinflation to Liz Taylor...

...Claude Sautet's new film, like his The Things of Life, purports to deal with relationships among men and women that cannot be readily resolved no matter how civilized and matureor, conversely, primitive and intemperatethose embroiled in them may be...

...This blot on Sinclair's scutcheon was, in fact, unavoidable, because Richard Burton could be gotten for the first narrator only at the cost of this cameo role for Liz And Burton, besides looking good on a marquee, is considered the mandatory Thomas interpreter...

...Suppose someone were to recite a Shakespearean sonnet while performing complicated stunts on the high wire...

...As you can seeor, rather, hearfrom that typical shred of mere epistolary prose, Thomas was a poet always, and always the poet of onomatopoeia...

...There are also many felicitous inventions, such as the license plate on the English tourist bus that invades Llareggub: ACH 1066...

...She lounges about amorphously and drips some eminently un-Welsh-sounding verbiage in her customary margarine-cum-molasses delivery...

...However brilliant his other gifts may have been, supreme among them was onomatopoeia...

...But Romy is drawn back to them, and menage a trois it is...

...the musical score performs efficaciously...

...As Thomas described the play to Princess Caetani, it is "an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness...

...The obvious difficulty with the former procedure is that you also get duplication, as in those hideous TV commercials, where the words on screen are also boomed out at you with hectoring redundancy...

...Professor William York Tindall, asked the departing poet to write something Welsh in his guest book...

...Of course, there was meaning wrapped inside this sound...

...In the case of the first two, you take a line like "And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dew grazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea . . ." addressed to blind Captain Cat, and you either match it with cinematic images that illustrate the words, or you contrast it with more or less discrepant images...

...There are, essentially, three approaches...

...All this is shown superficially and repetitiously, with the emphasis on the chic aspects of life fast cars and attractive dwellings not on probing the characters...

...There is splendid color cinematography by the dependable Jean Boffety once we get beyond the monochromatic blue of the title sequence, and Sautet keeps the film hopping...

...Peter O'Toole, however, is charming as the memory-haunted old seadog, and a large cast of famous English and not so famous Welsh actors is uniformly delightful...

...Dylan Thomas initially entitled his play Llareggub, A Piece for Radio Perhaps...

...THE CINEMATOGRAPHY of Bob Huke (who shot The Virgin and the Gypsy) is full of colors that seem to ripen before your eyes without ever growing overripe...

...The woman in particular is a blank, either fixing drinks for the card-playing tycoon and his business friends or making coffee for the cartoonist and his late-working fellow "artists...

...brawlingly specific...

...too swaggeringly...

...The second has the disadvantage of dumping the audience in a two-ring circus where, trying to catch both the verbal and visual acts, it ends up missing both...

...for the most part, quietly assured...

...but the sound itself was an image, not so much of the rattling of rain or nibbling of mice or whatever, as of the glory of and exultation in language language as it gathers up the delirium of feeling, twinkling, being, and converts it into fountains and fireworks of sonority...

...The movie is too much with us...

...True, Under Mild Wood is written mostly in prose, but a prose that eschews the strictures of meter and rhyme only to be more gorgeously, frenziedly poetic, in both the good and bad senses of the word...

...the life of the Welsh town hides ribald jokes inside its rapt, onomatopoeic lyricism...