Jassy

The last film in the popular Gainsborough Studios costume cycle is certainly beautiful to look at with sumptuous Technicolor and the company's biggest ever budget for lavish period sets.Dramatically the direction is rather lifeless with bitty editing and short Tv style scenes.The second half of the film is much better with an authorititive performance from star Margaret Lockwood and a nasty villain in Basil Sydney. Patricia Roc has a less sympathetic role than usual as the wilful, amoral Dilys but the film really misses the star power of Stewart Granger and James Mason who,several years earlier, would have played the roles take by Sydney and Dermot Walsh.A happy ending is substituted for the tragic one in the original novel..

Set in the 1830s, in elegant period costume, JASSY is a very English tale of love, hate, marriage, adultery, sadistic husbands, scheming wives, whip-wielding fathers, capricious lovers, unrequited love, gambling addicts, snobbery, class antagonism, bigotry, a girls' boarding school, country houses and masters and servants. Oh, and two murders, one by poisoning. And a suicide. It would be nice to add: - and all in the first reel. Well, not quite.

Bernard Knowles, a distinguished cameraman turned moderate director, makes something of a jumble of the first half hour, introducing too many characters and failing to distinguish those with an important part to play. It seems at first, for example, that the splendid Linden Travers as Lady Helmar will be a major protagonist, but she disappears after a couple of scenes, a typical waste of her talents. It's only with Barney's rescue of Jassy that Knowles starts to pull the disparate threads together.

Margaret Lockwood is wonderful as Jassy, the remarkable, psychic, gypsy girl with immaculate English enunciation, though brought up and tutored solely by her father, the resolutely Scottish John Laurie. Coping well enough as the disadvantaged young woman working at the finishing school, she really gets into her stride as the whip-cracking - metaphorically speaking - mistress of the manor house. Looking, as she does, the epitome of glamour, it's no wonder lecherous landowner Helmar - Basil Sydney - finds it difficult to keep his hands off her. Strutting around like an overfed turkey-cock he's entertaining throughout; both he and Lockwood kept getting the giggles in their highly-charged scenes together, setting each other off, causing several re-takes. No doubt some of the corny dialogue didn't help and later, in the court-room scene, Alan Wheatley uses the old acting technique of speaking very slowly and deliberately, to take the curse off a particularly trite sentence. Matching Margaret in the glamour stakes, Patricia Roc 'The Goddess of the Odeons' is excellent as the fickle, opportunistic Dilys, a welcome contrast to her goody-goody Caroline in THE WICKED LADY. The young Dermot Walsh is convincing as one of the few wholly honest characters. All this and Dennis Price, Esma Cannon, then around fifty but playing the much younger Lindy and Ernest Thesiger too.

Thought lost for many years, JASSY was located and restored in the early 1980s, receiving its first British TV transmission in December 1984 on Channel Four. I should love the opportunity to see Jassy and Dilys on the big screen and the continuing lack of a DVD release remains a mystery. Certainly for Margaret Lockwood fans, JASSY is a film to see again. And again...

This proclaims itself as a tale of the 17th century, yet costumes, sets and props belong to the late 18th early 19th as understood in the 1940s. The manners, speech and relationships are early 20th century. The fact that this imposes on the audience describes just how "exciting" this tale is. Unfortunately, the attitude to superstition and witchcraft belongs to an earlier time. The fantasy about how servants were treated is completely laughable. Some careers clearly in a rut. Even the presence of Esma Cannon cannot rescue this tripe.

Sprawling costume drama casts Margaret Lockwood as a gypsy girl Jassy who has second sight. She gets a job as maid in the household of a once-great family who have lost everything due to father's (Dennis Price) gambling. But she falls in love with the son (Dermot Walsh) whose ambition it is to regain the family estate from the cruel master (Basil Sydney).

Later, Jassy gets a job at the school for girls where she befriends the daughter of the cruel master (Patricia Roc) and poses as her friend when the girl is expelled from the school. She moves into the estate where she is made housekeeper. But the cruel master has his eye on her.

In another storyline, a brutish blacksmith beats his wife and daughter (Esma Cannon) causing the daughter to lose her voice via a throat injury. She eventually gets a job as maid in the estate where Jassy has gone to live. The "loony" as she is called, becomes the devoted slave to Jassy.

After a riding accident, the cruel master is saved by the loony. He is returned to his estate where Jassy takes full control. But after his death Jassy and the loony are accused of murder.

Lockwood is terrific as Jassy, the gypsy girl who is kinder and truer than all the grand people around her. Cannon turns is a superb performance as the pitiful loony. Dennis Price, Patricia Roc, Dermot Walsh, and Basil Sydney are also very good. Co-stars include Linden Travers, Ernest Thesiger, Cathleen Nesbitt, Susan Shaw, Hugh Pryse, Jean Cadell, Beatrice Varley, Torin Thatcher, and Nora Swinburne.

Muriel Box grumbled to her diary when Gainsborough's first film in Technicolor hit screens "Bad notices, bad film - huge commercial success".

A barnstorming gothic melodrama set in 1830 with glowing Technicolor photography by Geoffrey Unsworth sweeping about Maurice Carter's sets, it enabled audiences suffering the daily realities of life in postwar austerity Britain to wallow in the vicissitudes of an era even harsher than their own while savouring the brightly coloured frocks devised by Elizabeth Haffenden for Margaret Lockwood & Patricia Roc.

It is also awash with familiar faces, although they are seldom onscreen for very long; notable exceptions being Basil Sydney as the riding crop-wielding meanie Jassy marries for the house he won off Denis Price playing cards; and Esma Cannon in one of her early dramatic roles as 'the loony'. (Price murdered Miss Cannon in the same year's 'Holiday Camp, but here they share no scenes).

Great fun.