Movies: Ghosts Fly Backwards

Except through smoky rose-colored Hollywood glasses, poetry is seldom seen in movie scripts, which, as literature, are at their lyrical zenith when they read something like: MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT, SIDE EXIT DOOR, BATHED IN a SINGLE YELLOW LIGHT.

A movie script is being published this autumn, however, which ignores the close-shot, long-shot lingo of the camera’s eye, implicitly mistrusts the camera’s capacity to discern, and with a natural if unnecessary eloquence offers its own scene-setting visions of South Pacific backgrounds. Small wonder. Called The Beach of Falesá, the script was written by Dylan Thomas. In its stagy directions, “a stream foams out of the descending galleries and gardens of the tremendous, verdurous, impenetrable high interior of the island,” and a “lantern and the moonlight make the bush all turning shadows that weave to meet and then spin off, that hover overhead and fly away, huge, birdlike, into deeper inextricable dark.”

Dark & Charmed. Based on a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas’ movie was commissioned in the late ’40s by a subsidiary of the J. Arthur Rank organization. But Rank dissolved the subsidiary before the film could be produced, and the script vanished into the Rank bank. Richard Burton owns it now, in partnership with a New York producer, and sooner or later Burton intends to commit the story to film, with himself starring as an island trader named Wiltshire.

Wiltshire arrives at Falesá, sets up shop, and is befriended by another white trader who generously provides him with a beautiful native “wife.” Both traders offer tinned salmon and washing blue to the natives.

But nobody trades with Wiltshire. His “wife,” it turns out, is taboo. Case, the other trader, has craftily skewered him —and there follows an adventuresome confrontation of good and evil as Wiltshire struggles for his existence against this betel-nut Belial who once went to Oxford and who now wears sharks’ teeth around his neck and spooks the entire island with his weird, wicked acts and weirder metaphysics. “The ghosts of beautiful women,” he says, “fly backwards so that you cannot see the worm marks on their faces.”

Trade Traders. That nugget never occurred to Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom Thomas was faithful in plot structure alone, replacing Stevenson’s old salty seadog manner with a moody romanticism, but preserving Stevenson’s gun-shooting, skeleton-rattling scary tale of fists, love and danger. His most interesting character is Case, the incarnate devil—”ironically attitudinizing, full of disgust and venom there in the fly-loud, flyblown, bottle-strewn bedded room.” The part is intended at present for James Mason, but Burton would do well to trade traders with him.

Dylan Thomas wrote Falesá while living in a trailer in Oxford. He got about $3,300 for it, most of which he wheedled out of the producers in advance, soulfully telling them that he had no money for Christmas presents for his children. When he had story conferences with the cinema people, he would listen cooperatively to their suggestions, then goforget everything in a string of Soho pubs. Said one movie man: “If that boy had had a bit of discipline, he would have been the greatest screenwriter of all time.”