Among the many titles in Joseph Losey's filmography, The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) remains the director's most elusive film, one which has been exceedingly difficult to see since its original release. Of course, there are reasons for this. The film failed at the box office and Losey practically disowned it after the studio took over the final editing without his participation. Yet, despite some obvious flaws - a storyline that seems lifted from a cheap Harlequin romance novel and a tendency toward melodramatic excess - the film has its admirers and is fascinating for themes (master/servant relationships) and visual styling which would become more developed in Losey's later work.
Prior to making The Gypsy and the Gentleman, Losey suffered sporadic periods of unemployment, partly the result of his being blacklisted within the Hollywood film industry for his political affiliations. Relocating to England, he eventually won a three picture contract with Rank, thanks to the influence of actor Dirk Bogarde who was to star in Losey's first project, "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," a film based on the short story. When the movie never materialized due to scripting problems and Bogarde's busy schedule, Losey was finally forced to honor his contract and pick a new project. What initially attracted him to The Gypsy and the Gentleman, after rejecting numerous other screenplays, was its portrayal of the class system in English society and its damaging consequences, a theme which constantly reoccurs in his work (The Servant (1963), The Go-Between, 1970). He also wanted to do a costume drama that truly captured its period setting. As he revealed in Conversations with Losey by Michel Ciment, "I had decided that we should make an extravagant melodrama and at the same time try and present something of the real feeling of the Regency period where there were no toilets, and people bathed once a week if they were lucky, in a tub, and the gentlemen, when they got drunk, pissed in the fireplace."
Unfortunately, making The Gypsy and the Gentleman was a miserable experience for Losey. As he recalled in his interview with Ciment, "The producer, Maurice Cowan, was a monster. He was on the set at eight-thirty every morning, although work didn't begin until a quarter to nine, with his watch in his hand, saying 'Where is everybody? Why haven't we started?' and that was his single contribution, really, to the picture." Losey was also frustrated by the frequent visits to the set by Melina Mercouri's lover, director Jules Dassin, because his presence there was adversely affecting her performance. "One day," Losey recalled, "I had to ask him not to stand behind the camera because it was destroying me and destroying her. In the event, we finished the picture but it became subject to horrible executive interferences from all kinds of sources. My good relationship with [producer] John Davis had vanished because, in the end, I'd been too frank with him. And I suddenly found that, while I was talking to composers I wanted, they had already signed a man by the name of Hans May, a Hungarian, who wrote terrible sentimental popular songs. By this time I was pretty physically ill with frustration and exhaustion. When the picture went for mixing, I had this score of May's imposed...it changed the mood and the pace to such a degree, that for the first and only time in my life I left the picture before it was finished."
Despite Losey's low assessment of The Gypsy and the Gentleman, the film should be of great interest to any admirer of the director's work and it's full of the dark, disturbing undertones that distinguish Losey's later, more perverse character studies like The Servant and Secret Ceremony (1968). The production design is also visually stunning and justifiably so since Losey based it on portrait painter Thomas Rowlandson's prints of eighteenth century England. As for the famous final sequence where Belle and Deverill's carriage crashes into the river, it was inspired by Robert Browning's poem, "Porphyria's Lover." Losey did concede that The Gypsy and the Gentleman had a beautiful pictorial quality and later added, "I made them show it without the sound track at a Losey festival in France...It worked marvelously because the story tells itself without words."
Producer: Maurice Cowan
Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Janet Green; based on a novel by Nina Warner Hooks
Cinematography: Jack Hildyard
Editing: Reginald Beck
Music: Hans May
Cast: Melina Mercouri (Belle), Keith Michell (Sir Paul Deverill), Patrick McGoohan (Jess), June Laverick (Sarah Deverill), Flora Robson (Mrs. Haggard), Lyndon Brook (John Patterson), Mervyn Johns (Brook), Laurence Naismith (Forrester), Nigel Green (The Game Pup).
C-103m.
by Roger Fristoe
