[2] It featured performances by Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Siân Phillips, David Jason, Glynis Johns, Victor Spinetti, Ruth Madoc, Angharad Rees, Ann Beach, Vivien Merchant, and Peter O'Toole as the residents of the fictional Welsh fishing village of Llareggub.

Along the Welsh coast lies a village called Llareggub – or "bugger all" backwards – which is peopled with eccentrics like Captain Cat, a seafaring man who is losing his sight; the sexy Rosie Probert and Mr. Waldo, a jack-of-all-trades who is full of regret.

[4] "The film, beautifully photographed and spoken, casts the brooding spell of Thomas’ verse in its reconstruction of the seaside village and the daily round of its inhabitants", wrote Andrew Sinclair in the International Herald Tribune.

In The Times, John Russell Taylor wrote: It is hard to know what to say about a film of Under Milk Wood except that there is really only one way it could turn out, and that is precisely the way this one does.

The essence of Dylan Thomas's classic radio play was, necessarily, its use of words, of word-painting to evoke with intense vividness all that, in the nature of things, we could not see.