As film club members filed out last Monday evening, there were mutterings of ‘Richard Burton’ and ‘what are you going to say about that?’ We had just been treated to the 2015 Kevin Allen production starring Rhys Ifans. Umm... well, I read somewhere (probably Wikipedia) that Dylan Thomas’s only direction to the actors who joined him for its first stage reading in New York, was ‘love the words.’

The trouble is, the words were high-jacked a year later by Richard Burton for the radio version (and 20 years later for the full-blown film along with Liz), and Burton’s oh-so-Welsh-oh-so-sonorous voice works like an ear-worm. We all love the words, and there is no doubt that Allen’s incredibly talented cast loved the words, too, but somehow, I get the feeling that we all love the narrator’s words best when Burton says them.

Sorry Rhys - our local Haverfordwest boy - we love you dearly, but you’re up against not only Burton, but O’Toole as well. (O’Toole played Captain Cat in the ’70s film, whereas in this version, Rhys Ifans bravely takes on both narrator and Captain’s roles).

Mrs. ‘lovely’ Liz Burton played Capt. Cat’s lost love, Rosie Probert, whereas, this time round, she is mysteriously omitted; no matter! Charlotte Church made up for all by being a wonderfully cherubic Polly Garter - and as we know - Polly Garter was no cherub! She sang, smiled, danced and wiggled her socks off, amongst other garments.

Garments were generally discarded liberally throughout the film, with life in Llareggub portrayed as pretty promiscuous all round. Wil Thomas as the Rev. Eli Jenkins and Aneirin Hughes as Organ Morgan were both brilliant, despite the machinations of their director’s over-active imagination, which I thought only served to under-mine their credibility.

Mark Thomas’s jazzy score added to the raunchy atmosphere, although at times, I wondered if all the singing and dancing rendered the characters, more caricatures, set into a series of tableaux.

Lucky Solva got the lion’s share of the location filming, with a glimpse of St. Catherine’s Island randomly slotted in somewhere en route. Perhaps it was a diplomatic choice made to avoid the long-standing rivalry between Laugharne and Newquay. (In the same vein, the Burton film was shot in Lower Fishguard). Either way, Llareggub looked beautiful, which was what D.T. intended.

Not a great one for talking about the war, he said once that the idea of ‘Under Milk Wood’ came to him as a response to the Hiroshima bombings; it was his way of ‘reasserting the evidence of beauty in the world.’ Nice to think it was a village in our corner of Wales which gave him the inspiration, but not nice to think that a misdirected film could send it off-course.

Next film at the Fourcroft, on Monday, May 16, is ‘Carol,’ starring Cate Blanchett. A romantic drama about forbidden love, set in ’50s New York, from the book by Patricia Highsmith. Screening at 8 pm, or book a pre-film supper in Ozzie’s Restaurant.

For details, visit films4tenby.co.uk

J.H