The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970)

Excellent adaptation.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

In the magnificent verdant landscapes of old England ,a young girl and her sister stifle in a puritan sexually-repressed atmosphere;the father,a minister ,is surrounded by a family living in the past -particularly the grandma- ,the mother left the house a long time ago and the relatives tell them their branch of the family is degenerate ;the meal ,when the girls come back from France ,is subject to holy writ quotations (the prodigal "daughters " and the fat calf),and when the eldest tells her dad she needs an occupation,he suggest she give Sunday school lessons.This milieu is rotten to the core ,the heroine seems to live in a gilded cage .Leo ,the local bourgeois lad ,enjoys looking at the others when they work(the dam is a transparent metaphor which will be smartly used for the conclusion) .Even the "modern " couple" is not that liberal,particularly the woman who is horrified when the girl tells her she is in love with a gypsy:sexual liberation,OK ,but stick with your own kind! When th gypsy opens the car door and let the maid out ,he opens the floodgates :freom this moment on,the good girl will rebel against her milieu:the show,which includes risqué jokes and French can -can(not shown),the slap in Leo's face ,the visit to those "persons" who live like animals , the swimming in the nude ;in fact the gypsy's presence is not long on the screen ,he has no name ,he is the en-lightener : a crude uneducated man is the only person who has understood the girl's lack of love and tenderness.The bursting of the dam may be simplistic symbolism:it destroys the house,drowns the grandmother who represents a past ,a puritan past ,and allows the two lovers to sleep together in the girl's own bed! The last picture ,a car running across the smoking ruins makes sense,although the divorced woman might be a bourgeois rebel ,almost an oxymoron.In its muffled atmosphere,"the virgin and the gypsy " is really a sleeper which should be rediscovered.Like this?try these....-Lady Chatterley's lover (same writer,several versions) -the go-between (Losey) -Tess (Polanski) -Maurice (Ivory)

Obviously made to cash in on "Women In Love" but lacking in the former's brooding atmosphere or rampant sensuality, The Virgin & The Gypsy promises much but fails to deliver.The racy (for its time) title and the full-on nudity of its predecessor must have brought out the dirty mac brigade in droves when it was released. If so, they were to be sorely disappointed. Here we find Franco "Sex On Legs" Nero paired with an unremarkable lead actress of charisma-bypass proportions. No chemistry between them. None.The editing seems to be remarkably clumsy and I've yet to see a print that has been remastered which all adds to the the impression of a moth-eaten also-ran. The pace is slow. The production values are cheap. It's just not very good.

The Virgin and the Gypsy was a novella by D. H. Lawrence that contrasted the suffocating closeness and inhibited atmosphere of an English cleric and his extended family with the awakening sexuality of his eldest daughter and the free spirited influence of a gypsy whom she meets.The excellent screenplay by Alan Plater who also did the screenplay for "The Priest of Love", a biography of D. H. Lawrence, complements the direction by Christopher Miles. Their efforts helped create a film that matches if it does not surpass, the prose of D. H. Lawrence. A few scenes still stand out; the hysteria of Aunt Cissie who screams insults through the door at Yvette., the comedy of the church social evening when Uncle Fred sings a bawdy, music-hall song and the scene in which the Gypsy confronts and stares down several English youths.I saw Franco Nero earlier in the film "Camelot." He plays the Gypsy in this film with quiet, machismo, atitude. Joanna Shimkus also played with quiet, understated style that plays well with that of Nero.I saw this film during its initial release in 1970. I hope television networks may eventually air this film again or that it finds its way into a video or DVD.

Browsing through and cataloguing my tapes just now (I genuinely had nothing better to do) I found this film 'The Virgin and the Gypsy', which I must have taped off channel 5 some time back for the sole purpose of forwarding through to the saucy bits, weapon at the ready and perched alertly over the remote.Now that I'm too old for such shenanigans (and not living at home has taken away the 'someone-could-walk-in-at-any-minute' edge), I thought I'd actually watch the film.To summarise, it's not that great, not that bad, some nice photography, I just found out the main bird is Mrs Sidney Poitier, she is very good looking in it, but provides very little amusement for adolescent armchair residents, especially in these days of the internet (where nothing less than a horse-midget combo will do). And I reckon the guy (the 'Gypsy' of the title) inspired Kevin Rowland's Dexy's 'look'.