The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) User Reviews

British costume Melodrama in full colour

[Moor-Larkin · 6/10 · 25 August 2005]

I have only managed to get an Austrian-dubbed version of this film. As Losey is quoted as saying he preferred to view his movie as a 'silent film' I flatter myself that I am seeing the Directors Cut! The quality of the cinematography is as stunning as the sight of McGoohan in his full russet-haired glory in 1958. With full beard he bounds through his scenes with the carefree abandon of a man completing a contractual request. His bullying and abusive treatment of Melina Mercouri also forms a neat contradiction to his gallant Danger Man persona of a few years later.

One or two dialogue-ridden scenes had me struggling to guess what sub-plot was being hatched but as Losey predicted, you can pretty much follow the story by watching the moving pictures! The famous 'Porphyria' ending that leaves McGoohan to make his watery escape from justice emphasises the utterly anti-hero approach to all the main characters. Keith Michell is dissolute and craven, Mercouri is utterly domineering over her weak-willed victim but then equally craven when dealing with the ruthless McGoohan. He, meanwhile is a physical coward when confronted.

Dame Flora evidently helps the put-upon sister to retrieve her inheritance (at least, I think that was what was going on!) but to be honest you are more interested in the evil-doers than the do-gooders by then.

The quality of the scenery, costume and set designs never flags. 1958 was probably not the year to launch a film with no romantic hero or happy ending but this high quality colour epic has given a snapshot of McGoohan to be treasured.

UPDATED 8/6/06. Finally got hold of a copy with the original dialogue. Have to admit it's even better when you can understand the words. McGoohan is utterly amoral, Belle becomes slightly more vulnerable - she adores him so. The subtlety of the lawyers sub-plot becomes more apparent too and explains the imprisonment of the sister in the Folly on the lake, which I was always a bit puzzled about. McGoohan got some good lines. I like his very first where he comments to Belle that he prefers horses to women because he could rely on horses :-)). The music was a bit silly in the one or two chase sequences but mostly there just wasn't any - so I don't know why Losey was so upset about it. Maybe the video-releases didn't include the cinema music. With the dialogue the plot is so obviously Losey working out the angles for his famous movie: "The Servant".

Look to the minor characters

[Igenlode Wordsmith · 6/10 · 18 June 2009]

There is something to be said for this film -- as an earlier comment mentions, the most interesting characters are the supporting cast: Paul Deverill's fianceé and her father, Mrs Haggard, the Game Pup, the maidservant Hattie, the mad-house doctor, and the shadowy Jess himself. There are even some notably effective moments in the script. Unfortunately, the leading characters -- in particular, Belle herself -- are crudely painted and all too often even more crudely acted. June Laverick as Sarah comes off better than her brother because the character is more reserved (and, of course, more sympathetic from the audience's point of view: Paul is a sot and a petticoat-ruled fool), but even she has some pretty poor line-readings when it comes to her romantic scenes.

At least this time there is no shortage of plot: compared to "Accident" this is a breakneck scramble of lurid incident (though I was wondering well before the end why they didn't just kill Sarah for her inheritance and be done with it -- Belle doesn't seem the type to hesitate). It avoids a surprising number of the clichés of the genre, having the courage to 'be bad': the seducer does not weaken and fall in love with her victim, but remains obstinately attached to her lowborn confederate, the hero does not see the error of his ways and return to the woman who truly loves him, and Jess, effectively the mastermind of the whole affair, apparently gets away scot-free at the end. The result is that it remains unexpected.

Sadly, however, it just isn't terribly good. It lacks both the humour and the charisma of "The Wicked Lady", for example (instead of finding an unwilling sympathy for all the characters at various times, I found most of them here fairly irritating most of the time), and the casting of an actress of the calibre of Flora Robson, who makes memorable a relatively small part, only serves to point up the weakness of the principals. As bodice-rippers go, this probably had some potential -- but the finished product isn't really it.

Bawdy, bitchy and beguiling for its time...

[RJBurke1942 · 6/10 · 12 May 2007]

I hadn't seen any of Losey's films for years, so I was intrigued to catch this one on late night TV a few weeks back.

What a melodrama! The story is set in 18th century rural England. A gypsy couple decide to wheedle their way into the favors of an English country gentleman, Sir Paul Deverill (Keith Michell) with the express purpose of milking him for all that he's got. Trouble is, Sir Paul is nearly broke and he plans to marry into a nearby rich family so as to bolster his fortunes.

The femme fatale, Belle (Melina Mercouri), seduces Sir Paul and eventually becomes the lady of the house, squandering and stealing all that he has, and ably supported by her true lover, Jess (Patrick McGoohan), whom she loves passionately. Trouble is, Jess doesn't care too hoots for Belle – he just wants all the money.

A sub-plot then surfaces: Sir Paul's sister, Sarah (June Laverick) is bequeathed a fortune by their great aunt – but only if she marries before the age of twenty-one. Sarah is madly in love with a brilliant young medical student, John Patterson (Lyndon Brook) and he wants to marry her now, already, but she hesitates. That's her undoing, because Sir Paul – rascal that he is – spirits her away to a secret place to hold her prisoner until she is over twenty-one. Trouble is, Sir Paul doesn't reckon on Patterson's determination to find his lost love...

Does Sarah succeed in escaping from her prison? Will Sir Paul get the fortune illegally? Will Belle find true love with Jess, or will she remain with Sir Paul? Whew...sounds like something from The Bold and The Beautiful, huh?

Very nicely photographed in brilliant colour, and the fast pacing of the narrative tends to leave one mentally breathless as it races to the denouement. While the stereotypical characters, the costumes, and the over-the-top dialog and acting, all tend to reinforce my thought that Losey's objective was to provide a satire of that period. I think he succeeded.

Not as good a film as other Losey efforts but worth a look.

Decay.

[dbdumonteil · 27 June 2002]

Decay is the keyword for many a Losey movie:"the servant" which the precedent user mentions,but also "king and country", "Boom","secret ceremony" "figures in a landscape",and in his towering achievement "M.Klein".Decay is the main topic of "gypsy anfd the gentleman":the titles tells it all.

A broke gentleman,whose mansion is mortgaged,and who 's slowly sinking into alcoholism,meets a gypsy,Belle,herself under her lover Jess's thumb.He flouts conventions and marries her.It's the beginning of a storylike,melodramatic yarn,in the grand tradition of the popular novels of the nineteenth century.

Let's put it straight.The weakest link is Melina Mercouri.She's ludicrous and laughable .Her grimaces and her outré swagger do not convince at all:when she discovers she married a ruined man and starts destroying all things in sight,she generates nothing but horse-laugh. She's in direct contrast to the rest of the cast,which is thoroughly excellent,particularly Patrick McGoohan's machiavelian Jess and Flora Robson.

Losey's directing is sometimes breathtaking and makes us forget the implausibilities of the screenplay:crazy cavalcades,strange places (the Summer house:the pagoda),and a final which would fit in an horror movie. The supporting characters sometimes seem embryonic.Losey always said he did not love this work,and the reason can be found in the editing:some characters were very interesting:Paul the aristocrat's fiancée and her father who both know that the marriage will not be a love one;the proud fighter who refuses Paul's purse;Flora Robson's "the Legend" who has been done down by the scenarists.

Paul Deverill's decay remains the center of Losey's movie.When the movie begins, he's only half corrupt,he's still got his pride.He knows his world is crepuscular but he despises his sister's fiancé,a "sawbone",one of these parvenus whose star is on the rise. His fall from grace will be infamous :"No I'm damned" he said towards the end.Note that Belle always calls him by his surname "Deverill". Had Belle be played by a talented actress,her relationship with her lover Jess would have been absolutely fascinating.Actually,Belle is only a pawn in Jess's game,he's the real master,Belle and Paul being his puppets.

The magnificent country landscapes predate "the go-between" and the relationship Paul/Jess "the servant".The Summer house full of old stuff like the teddy bear forecasts the attic in "secret ceremony",this attic where everybody would like to invent a past for himself.Paul's lost identity will find his exact equivalent in "M.Klein.Although imperfect ,"gypsy and the gentleman",this British extravaganza,deserves to be seen.

Mercouri and McGoohan make the social melodrama interesting

[JuguAbraham · 6/10 · 26 September 2020]

Good screen presence of Melina Mercouri and Patrick McGoohan. A typical melodrama that an average viewer would like. A typical Losey film accentuating the class differences and wealth-related social differences. Mercouri slipped into the role of a gypsy with elan. Cinematographer Jack Hildyard's indoor photography was unusually below par with lights on as candles were doused. I guess he won fame for his outdoor work in films such as "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

How DOES McGoohan get on that horse?

[NellsFlickers · 5/10 · 17 April 2020]

Yet another Patrick McGoohan film I had to scratch off my "To Watch" list. I had already formed an opinion of it thanks to female fans' comments regarding his kissing scenes, McGoohan's own opinion of his Rank films, and even one newspaper editorial from years ago where a woman was rather upset at his non-Secret Agent-like character. I found a copy of the film posted online and gave it a view...

In summary: the two lead characters are, well... CADS. It is very hard to be sympathetic to either of them. They both ask for what they get. Mercouri seemed to be pushing the whole sexy-thing a bit too much. Her whole performance was a bit over the top. McGoohan's character, Jess, one minute seems almost nice, then nasty, then a bit of both, then also a cad. He looks darn sexy in his beard, and HOW does he get onto that horse like that??

The "nice" characters are pretty run-of-the-mill, though Flora Robson was a bit of a stand-out.

I was semi-impressed by the "look" of the film, with colorful sets and costumes, outdoor scenes, etc. It didn't look cheap. But the plot looses you after a while, and the ending is... well... trite...

Watch it if you must, but have a good reason to, like I did...

;-)

Losey's British brilliance didn't begin with 'The Servant'.

[the red duchess · 8/10 · 2 April 2001]

'The gypsy and the Gentleman' is a ripe Regency melodrama, a lurid update of the Gainsborough costume dramas so popular in Britain during the Second World War. At a time when British cinema saw a tussle between congealed Rattigana, 'modest' comedies and the already dated novelty of Free Cinema, it took an American to inject invigorating doses of colour, sex and violence.

In terms of narrative, nothing much has changed since Gainsborough- the hero is a dissolute aristocrat; femininity is divided into the traditional pucelle/putain dichotomy, with Sarah as the meritocratic maiden who sees the Victorian future as middle class, and wants to marry a decent, dull doctor in spite of her brother's class objections. Belle is a gypsy, the underclass outsider who seeks to infiltrate the gentry; her exotic foreignness is stereotypically portrayed, dusky face, hammy voice, gaudy coloured clothes, linked to nature; but, most importantly, in the freedom of her movements, linked to her open sexuality, an expression of her manoeuvring supposedly ironcast class boundaries, and a contrast to the prim stiffness of Sarah, whose imprisonment in a fairy-tale tower is only a literalisation of the socio-cultural imprisonment faced by women of her class.

Unlike most costume dramas, where narrative pace is sacrificed in favour of fetishistic detail, 'Gypsy' is directed with abrupt urgency, perhaps taking its cue from Belle, more typical of later Hammer films, which would similarly explore themes of sex, violence, class, imprisonment in the sedated English countryside. This plot, however, is even more shocking than any Hammer film, each horrific plot-point accumulating a sadistic frisson that results from the swift violence of the filming.

The drunken opening scene with the pig, the lynch-mob chasing Belle at the fair, the dumping of a bound and gagged aristocratic heroine in the watery reeds by a brutal gypsy, the descent of the hero into drunken impotence and mental torpor; all these and more have a disturbing vividness, free from restraint, a carnivalesque disruption, never seen in the British cinema, before or since.

All this would be enough to make the film a sensationalist romp. The fact that it was directed by Hollywood exile Joseph Losey must make us acknowledge it as a classic. As he would later do with 'King and Country', he takes a genre whose assumptions he ideologically despises, films it faithfully, while subverting from within.

With its obtrusive framing, its heightened, unrealistic colour, its blatantly artificial sets, and its stylised acting, the film seems more like a 50s melodrama by Sirk, or a mid-period thriller by Chabrol, than a British costume drama. Even the beautiful English countryside, so skilfully evoked as to be almost tactile, seems fake, a gorgeous series of painted props.

This clash between narrative immediacy and formal alienation allows Losey to create a startlingly modernist work. As Fassbinder remarked of Sirk, it is the villains who are the sympathetic characters here, not the pallid heroes. For instance, the heroine is imprisoned so Belle and her gypsy lover can make a fortune, but it is Belle who is given the film's most miraculous shot, a composition of the vast rural landscape that pulls back to be revealed framed through a barred window, with Belle looking out, imprisoned when she seems at her most narratively powerful.

Typically, Losey is not interested in romantic stereotypes, but in the economic circumstances that turn people into what they are - it is money that determines characters' actions, even the 'good' ones, and drives the plot - in one Hitchcockian shot, the camera obliterates the human players and closes in on a purse of coins.

More importantly, the film is a first attempt at 'The Servant', the story of an aristocrat brought low by deceptive interlopers, potentially sterile economic arguments are shown to have their roots in sexual neurosis and attendant issues of power, social and sexual, and the body and gender. The way the despised outcasts bring ruin to the decadent gentry by increasingly barbarous schemes is filmed with barely concealed glee by Losey, even as Belle becomes an oppressor and thence self-destructive (Belle becomes tainted by power, Jed remains true to himself - a gendered 'political' argument?) - you imagine the director's heart is with the vandal who, like Losey the American in Britain, sneaks into the mansion at night, and starts smashing and shredding the decor. Fantastic.