Dylan Thomas's Film Scripts

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 4

Dylan Thomas's Film Scripts

Rebecca’s Daughters. By Dylan Thomas. Triton Publishing Company. 144 PP.

“Rebecca’s Daughters” is is one of several film scripts which Dylan Thomas wrote in 1948, when he was under contract to Gainsborough Pictures. It is a romantic tale, set in nineteenth century Wales during the period of the toll-gate riots. A young aristocrat called Anthony Raine, returns to his estates frorii military service in India, to find the highways choked with newly erected toll-gates. Being a liberalminded gentleman, he is appalled to see the hard-won earnings of the local farmers being transferred to the pocikets of the gentry, and he secretly decides to do something about it. He assumes for the purpose a split identity. By day he is the phlegmatic Englishman. swaddled like a baby against the rigorous climate, and unsuccessfully wooing the lovely Rhiannon, daughter of his neighbour Lord Sam. At night, however, he becomes Rebecca, riding the countryside in a woman's costume of black skirt, shawl, and steeple hat, followed by a band of three hundred black-skirted “daughters,” whom he incites to overpower the gate-keepers and bum down the toll-gates. In Rhiannon’* eyes the mysterious Rebecca is a romantic hero, whom she longs to meet; at the same time she continues to despise the leth-

argic Anthony Raine as an insufferable milksop. Eventually her wish is granted as Rebecca, in full flight from his pursuers, leaps through the bedroom window which she has hopefully left open for him, and removes his dis-guise-rto Rhiannon’s delight, who realises that it. was Anthony, after all, whom she had loved from the start. After further midnight adventures. the story ends happily with a close-up of flames from a burning toll-gate lighting the faces of Anthony and Rhiannon “smiling and close together.” The publisher's preface suggests fiat in writing “Rebecca’s Daughters” Dylan Thomas was attempting something more ambitious than an ephemeral film-script: and they quote a statement by his colleague Julian Maclaren Ross, that Thomas wished to write a complete film scenario “ready for shooting, which would give the ordinary reader an absolute visual impression of the film in words and could be published as a new form of literature.” Yet there is little, apart from the occasional phrase, to suggest that this was written by Dylan Thomas. It is accomplished hack-work, which it is doubtful if Thomas himself would have wished to see in print However serious his original approach to writing for the films, it is clear that “my war work” as he used to call it, very rapidly became a means for earning some badly-needed money: and there is something sad in this prospect of squandered energies that should, ideally, have been channelled into the writ ing of poems.