Film Scripts and other Prose Items

Abstract

During the war, two important factors determined his later development as a prose writer. The first was Dylan Thomas’s employment to write film scripts, both documentaries for the Ministry of Information and also features. Some of these film scenarios have been published, including Twenty Years A-Growing; The Beach of Falesa, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson set on a South Seas island and wherein themes of primitivism and superstition evidently interested Thomas; a film operetta Me and My Bike; and Rebecca’s Daughters set in south-west Wales in the 1840s and telling of the Rebecca rioters who protested violently against toll-gate taxes, Poor Law Amendment and consequent poverty and distress. It is a vividly unrolling story. But undoubtedly The Doctor and the Devils, written in 1944 and published a few months before Thomas’s death, is the most effective and interesting of his film scripts. It was the first film scenario to be published in book form before, and in fact, without film production, which took place finally in 1986. It heralds a literary quality unusual in the medium and in its style, dramatic power and presentation of low life in Edinburgh early in the last century may be regarded as a notable item in Thomas’s development as a prose writer.