Fast Company

By Stefan Kanfer

Salvation; damnation. Libertinism; slavery. Sexuality; death. To D.H. Lawrence, life was a series of primal contests, a mirror image of the Victorian ideal. Reason lay on one side, passion beckoned on the other, and woe betide the maiden who chose the wrong path. Lawrence, of course, was the advocate of passion. "The tragedy," he warned, "is when you've got sex in your head, instead of down where it belongs."

No story--and no film--better reveals Lawrence's moral absolutism than The Virgin and the Gypsy. Between its narrow boundaries is sown the seed of the Lawrentian canon--the familial conventions, the social hypocrisies, the annealing force of sex. The time is the '20s and the maiden is Yvette (Joanna Shimkus), who steps backward from French finishing school to her father's claustrophobic vicarage in northern England. The old authorities are reasserted, and Yvette is briefly cowed by her hectoring, rectoring father (Maurice Denham) and his priggish relatives. But there is a new spirit in the air. symbolized by soul-quickening jazz, bobbed hair and notions of the emancipated woman. Yvette soon tastes the salt in her blood and begins to seek the fast company of Mrs. Fawcett (Honor Blackman) and her lover, Major Eastwood (Mark Burns). Even more liberating is the anonymous brooding gypsy (Franco Nero), a prototype of Lawrence's glanded gentry.

When a virgin and a gypsy meet in fiction, one of them is due for alteration. Observing the classic literary conventions, Director Christopher Miles causes a dam to break during the sexual crescendo. At the finale, Yvette turns a smoothly tapered back on her family, climbs into Mrs. Fawcett's roadster and motors into the 20th century.

Salacious Song. Lawrence's work always rides perilously close to cheapness. In less discreet hands, The Virgin and the Gypsy could have been as overripe as Women in Love (TIME, April 13) or as sensation-seeking as The Fox. But at 31, Miles knows everything worth knowing about actors, if not about film. His water and fire symbols and andante flashbacks are modish and imprecise, but he makes his cast function with the proficiency and timing of a London rep company. With an accretion of under statements, Miles builds the universal tragedy of a family whose past consumes its future, that finds it far harder to acknowledge mistakes than to perpetuate them. His slow evocation of a vanished England is evident in the smallest vignette. For example: the town milquetoast (Norman Bird) appears at a charity show, blazes to life for one salacious song, then returns--almost with relief--to his eunuchoid role.

The best of an exemplary cast, Joanna Shimkus abruptly leaves behind a parade of elongated walk-ons (The Lost Man, Boom!) to become an authentic actress. Almost any beautiful woman could perform the film's love scenes, but few could engage so well in the skirmishes. Yvette's monstrous maiden Aunt Cissie

(Kay Walsh) is a frightening reminder of the hysterical women who were Freud's first patients. Against her, a lesser woman would be consumed, but Shimkus makes Yvette an individual of greater and more durable passion. She rides time like a ship; youth, philosophy, the century itself are the winds at her back. When she prevails, it is because of balance and conviction.

Ancient History. One of the articles of contemporary belief holds that the novel is perishing, that film alone is fresh and relevant. In fact, the new permissiveness in cinema is ancient history to the novelist. Long ago, Proust annihilated time, Joyce pulverized linear storytelling, and Lawrence shouted down the censors and proclaimed sexual freedom. Film is a lens that magnifies the artist as well as his material. Opulent new methods cannot conceal meanness of imagination. Deliberate scene-by-scene narrative cannot disturb the talent of a novelist whose work is done and a film maker whose career has scarcely begun.

. Stefan Kanfer

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