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When he meets Vera, who's now a singer, he's delighted and the pair begin flirting and reminiscing about their earlier romance. This is an atmosphere that could have been tailor-made for Thomas (Matthew Rhys), who alternates hack voiceover work at the BBC with nightly sessions at the pub. The film opens in London in 1940, as the city's beleagured inhabitants party frantically to distract themselves from the horrors of the blitz. Knightley plays Vera Phillips, a childhood friend and the poet's first love. This film, based on a script by Keira Knightley's mother, Sharman Macdonald, concentrates on their difficult marriage and an ensuing love triangle. He died at 39 and was survived by his equally hard-drinking wife Caitlin, with whom he shared an unremittingly tempestuous relationship. An heroic boozer, he even rivalled our own Brendan Behan, so comprehensively did he destroy his life and talent with gargantuan daily doses of alcohol. It's possible that 'Fern Hill' was influenced by the machine-gun incident.Of all disastrous literary drinkers, Dylan Thomas is perhaps the most legendary. The Edge of Love has little to tell us about Thomas the poet, even though during the period at New Quay, so crucial to the movie, he wrote several of his greatest poems. Maybury's Love is the Devil was an excellent double portrait of Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer, and illuminated the artist's work. But it's all more Annie Leibovitz than Bill Brandt. The makers even throw in what appears to be the horrendous 1941 bombing of the Café de Paris. The period detail is all shiny red lips, suspender belts, elegant blitzed wreckage with St Paul's cathedral in the background, and songs sung to entertain people sheltering in the London underground. Dylan looked like a degenerate cherub as a young man and was on his way to becoming a gargoyle by the end of the war.
![the edge of love the edge of love](https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/9vME5HozpzxAgMjPXPChLxq43ef.jpg)
None of the characters is particularly attractive, and the boozy, boastful, womanising Dylan is extremely unsympathetic, though he's played by Matthew Rhys, a handsome Welsh actor who closely resembles Richard Burton. This is a fascinating story, its chronology somewhat muddled and its dramatic thrust rather obscure.
![the edge of love the edge of love](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cf/ea/37/cfea37363bab1d72fbcc5843be11cee4.jpg)
Killick was tried for attempted murder, but being a war hero who'd taken action against someone he regarded as a draft dodger, he was inevitably acquitted. After a drinking bout he threatened Dylan and some friends with a machine gun, from which he fired several bursts, and a defective hand grenade. What is definite, however, is that in 1945 a troubled Killick returned from a fraught period working as a commando with Greek guerrillas, and was shocked to discover what looked like a ménage à trois between Dylan, Caitlin and Vera on the Carmarthen coast, and to find that the three had drained his bank account. Whether Vera lost her virginity to Thomas as a teenager and was briefly his lover during the war are matters for dispute, as is a possible lesbian relationship with Caitlin, though Sharman Macdonald's screenplay accepts all three conjectures as fact. Now at last we have John Maybury's The Edge of Love, set during the Second World War, about Dylan's tempestuous relationship with his temperamental, hard-drinking Irish wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and their friendship with Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley), a good-looking Welsh woman who knew Dylan in their pre-war youth, and her husband, Captain William Killick (Cillian Murphy), whom she met and married during the London Blitz.