Jassy ***½ (1947, Margaret Lockwood, Patricia Roc, Dennis Price, Basil Sydney, Dermot Walsh) – Classic Movie Review 5424

Alan Wheatley plays Sir Edward Walker in Jassy.

Director Bernard Knowles’s big-budget 1947 British romance Jassy stars Margaret Lockwood, who throws herself eagerly and with gay abandon into the role of the steamy, second-sighted gypsy Jassy Woodroofe, taken in as servant to Nick Helmar (Basil Sydney) and his daughter Dilys (Patricia Roc) in 17th century England.

Jassy marries Helmar and is suspected of killing her husband when he is found poisoned. She has received a mansion as her dowry that Christopher Hatton (Dennis Price) lost to Sydney at the gaming table, and Price’s son Barney (Dermot Walsh) wants it back.

This Gainsborough Pictures romantic-historical upmarket tosh is luridly entertaining hokum, if a little on the long-seeming side at 102 minutes, with colourful costumes, decent sets, nice bright Technicolor cinematography by Jack Asher and Geoffrey Unsworth and an exceptionally strong, iconic support cast.

With the screenplay by Dorothy Christie, Campbell Christie and Geoffrey Kerr, based on the 1944 novel by Norah Lofts, it is well made, exuberantly done and sneakily enjoyable. It is notable as the first and only Gainsborough Pictures film to be shot in colour, as the last official Gainsborough melodrama, though it was followed by The Bad Lord Byron and Christopher Columbus, both of which flopped.

A British DVD is available.

Also in the cast are Nora Swinburne as Mrs Hatton, Linden Travers as Beatrice Helmar, Ernest Thesiger as as Sir Edward Follesmark, Cathleen Nesbitt as Elizabeth Twisdale, John Laurie as Tom Woodroofe, Jean Cadell, Grey Blake, Clive Morton, Torin Thatcher, Beatrice Varley, Maurice Denham, Alan Wheatley (as Prosecuting Counsel Sir Edward Walker), Esma Cannon, Grace Arnold, Bryan Coleman, Eliot Makeham, Joan Haythorne, Hugh Pryse (as Defending Counsel Sir John Penty), Muriel George, Dennis Harkin, Noel Howlett, Jane Hylton, David Keir, Charles Rolfe, Stewart Rome, Susan Shaw, Wilfrid Brambell and Constance Smith.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5424

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