Simply Perfect

Sadly Over-hyped

Powerful

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

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...

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.

Ultimately, I was left rather disappointed in "Jassy" after a promising start. I think this is not helped by the way that the title character is the last of all to appear (in somewhat unconvincing 'dirty' make-up). Up to this point the plot has been unequivocally centred around young Barney Hatton; the audience is now expected to do a U-turn and enlist its emotions on the part of someone completely different, as the plot sets off cross-country in pursuit of Jassy's odyssey instead. It is not until some considerable time and a good deal of social-climbing have passed that we see anything again of the complex web of characters who seemed so important at the start...What I found disorienting was that the film seemed to keep switching allegiances in this manner throughout, which made it hard in the final analysis to become emotionally attached to any of the characters; by the end none of them seemed very likable, although I assume we were supposed to be on Jassy's side. The characters keep shifting -- good, bad, indifferent -- in what at first impressed me as a refusal to stereotype Nick Helmar, for example, as the villain of the piece, but ended up feeling like random inconsistencies bestowed for the sake of the plot.The scenario didn't come across as particularly well-rooted in the social realities of the era (or even of the genre) either. With one hand it emphasises the sacred priority of 'debts of honour' incurred at the gaming-table; but then with the other it expects us to believe that a man detected cheating at cards would be considered hard-done-by when his host *merely* tossed a glass of wine in his face. Such a sin, on the contrary, attracted utter social condemnation -- small wonder that Chris Hatton (Dennis Price, perhaps the most watchable player in the film) takes his own life... but scarcely as a result of the insult!Likewise, "Jassy" displays a good deal of wordless appreciation of the long hours and hard work expected of a 'tweeny', and the selfishness of the upper-class schoolgirls who expect her to sacrifice her brief nights to their escapades -- but then appears oblivious to the social cataclysm that threatens when Helmar's daughter attempts to pass off a serving-maid as a house guest and her father recognises the girl's name. Not only does Nick not turn a hair at discovering that his guest is the daughter of the rabble-rousing peasant leader who once berated him at the head of a mob on his own doorstep, but instead of throwing her out as a common impostor he actually apologises to her, which the script evidently considers the very least he could do. And apparently nobody in the village so much as blinks at seeing a raggedy ex-dairymaid elevated over them all as lady of the manor, without the slightest attempt to hide her origins.(I was also very frustrated by an apparent plot hole, in that a never-consummated marriage would not have been legally binding on the husband -- a very foolish trick for Jassy to play!)The love-affair with Barney, supposed to be the lynch-pin of the plot but rarely evident, failed to convince me. Dilys Helmar, introduced as a sympathetic character and ultimately used as an example of a mercenary bitch, had me completely confused, as did her father Nick, alternating between pettiness, random violence, and rare humanity.In a better film these contradictions would be an indication of great skill, but here, alas, they come across as signs of arbitrary incompetence. If you really want a 'gorgeous English film from the 40s', try "The Wicked Lady", "Blanche Fury" (in many ways similar) or "Fanny by Gaslight" for authentic melodrama and Gainsborough swagger: by comparison I'm afraid "Jassy" is a bit of a mess.

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..