Saddle Swords and Meeting Place
A Child's Christmas in Wales (1987)
directed by Don McBrearty
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD in San Antonio
A Child's Christmas in Wales is the winter twin to James Agee's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Dylan Thomas's yuletide prose were the sort of thing we took as a substitute for snow in South Texas - the context of a Welsh winter, with blazing pudding and elderberry wine, had no more purchase on our memories of holidays past than sleds, skates, or snowballs. But the cadence of Thomas's words on the page are familiar to the meter of our long Christmas mornings, and the stillness of electric lights on the eves of the house and limbs of the tree. Stretched to an hour, but not too thin, the 1987 PBS production is mostly illustration, but endures both as something you might remember watching as a kid, and something to watch now that you're not. Old men wake up in the middle of the night, and sleep is a boy's conclusion; "and then I slept," the movie ends, as it should.
directed by Don McBrearty
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD in San Antonio
A Child's Christmas in Wales is the winter twin to James Agee's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Dylan Thomas's yuletide prose were the sort of thing we took as a substitute for snow in South Texas - the context of a Welsh winter, with blazing pudding and elderberry wine, had no more purchase on our memories of holidays past than sleds, skates, or snowballs. But the cadence of Thomas's words on the page are familiar to the meter of our long Christmas mornings, and the stillness of electric lights on the eves of the house and limbs of the tree. Stretched to an hour, but not too thin, the 1987 PBS production is mostly illustration, but endures both as something you might remember watching as a kid, and something to watch now that you're not. Old men wake up in the middle of the night, and sleep is a boy's conclusion; "and then I slept," the movie ends, as it should.
posted by NPK at 9:02 AM
<< Home