User Reviews

If the thousands of passionate admirers of the inland canals of Britain knew of the existence of this film on DVD, they would surely all rush to buy it. So much of it was shot on location and shows the canals as they were long before the War, when a handsome shire horse stood beside every canal lock and people who lived in the narrow boats greeted or cursed each other as they passed year in and year out, some of them having never lived on dry land for a day in their lives. This film is very authentic because it is based upon a novel by A. P. Herbert, of the same title, and he was intimately familiar with river life, river pubs, and river people. From 1870 to 1971, Herbert lived at 12 and 13 Hammersmith Terrace, with his garden backing directly onto the Thames, where he could keep his own small boat. The pub in the novel and film is probably based upon the Black Lion, a few steps from his door. He knew people who lived on houseboats along the river, all of which moor on the north side of the river, where Herbert lived. Many such houseboats are still moored today at Chiswick, an easy walk from Hammersmith Terrace, not to mention further away in Chelsea as well. Herbert wrote another novel, THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER (1921, nine years before publishing THE WATER GIPSIES), which Fritz Lang filmed in 1950 as THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER. Both of these stories were inspired by the place where Herbert lived all his life. In 1966, he wrote a non-fiction book, THE THAMES, a survey of the river and of the life and work upon it and concerning it. The director of this film was the brilliant Maurice Elvey, famous for FANNY HAWTHORNE (1927, aka HINDLE WAKES, a sound remake of his earlier 1918 silent version of HINDLE WAKES; Victor Saville, who co-wrote the 1927 film then directed the story again himself in 1931 as HINDLE WAKES), and for THE CLAIRVOYANT (1934, see my review). Elvey directed an astonishing 196 films, though many of those were Sherlock Holmes silent shorts. He is also noted for the harrowing and unforgettable BEWARE OF PITY (1946), based on the novel by Stefan Zweig and starring Lili Palmer. In 1931, the year before making THE WATER GIPSIES, Elvey had made FOOTSTEPS IN THE NIGHT (aka A HONEYMOON ADVENTURE) which featured the first film appearance by a promising young actor named Peter Hannen, so it was natural for him to cast the handsome Hannen as the artist with a studio beside the river in THE WATER GIPSIES, in which Hannen was very good indeed. But then a tragedy occurred, and Hannen died on January 21, 1932, eleven months before the film had even been released, at the age of only 23. What is worse, he died because of the filming. In the story, he was called upon to dive into the Thames to save someone from drowning, which he did himself. As a result of this, he contracted influenza and died of the pneumonia which resulted. He had been a brilliant actor on the stage, playing leading roles in Shakespeare at the Old Vic and praised by all the critics of his time. The female lead in the film was played by Ann Todd, appearing in her fourth film. In this film she has one of those wobbly young tragic heroine voices which were popular at the time and seemed to be demanded of all film ingénues then. She was later to become one of the most famous and best loved of British film actresses of her generation, and perhaps the crowning performance of her film career was in David Lean's THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS (1949, see my review), which curiously was a sound remake of a silent film originally directed by Maurice Elvey in 1922 (a film which is apparently now lost). The story of THE WATER GIPSIES is that an attractive young girl who lives in a houseboat on the river, played' by Todd, poses as a model for Hannen and falls in love with him, but he does not notice, and never takes her seriously because of class differences. She has been courted for a long time by a narrow boatman played by Ian Hunter, but she finds him too boring. Her father, a classical musician, loses his job, and Todd's sister flees the houseboat and goes to the bad. On the rebound from her unsuccessful crush on Hannen, who is giving up his studio and moving away anyway, thus depriving her of her only source of income, Todd is desperate and marries the son of the local river publican, played by Richard Bird, which turns into a disastrous nightmare. She is mercifully freed from this by his death in the river. The film is thus something of a sad melodrama, but the main interest is the extensive depiction of river and canal life as it was 85 years ago. The film is well worth seeing, and is truly like stepping back in time into a world which few people alive can remember at all.

This film was shown as part of the quota quickies season at the NFT.It is a complete and utter mess.Maybe the reason is the number of writers who worked on this including John Paddy Carstairs,Miles Malleson and Alma Reville.Characters seem to come and go throughout this film with little reason.Worst of all is the young Anne Todd.She is woefully miscast in the lead.Sometimes she has a mumerset accent and other times she has a posh Home Counties accent.Little wonder that credited director Maurice Elvey stormed out after differences with Basil Dean leaving him to finish the film.The funny thing is that according to the programme notes the film was well received when it opened.I do not myself believe that this was a true quota quickie in that it runs 76 minutes.Furthermore Dean was expecting the distributors(RKO)Radio to use this as a first feature but they preferred to use this as a support to their Hollywood films,This led to Dean terminating his distribution arrangement with them and forming his own distribution company.I have to say that this is a pretty turgid piece which could easily lose around 20 minutes and still have left the main story intact.The incidental music comes from the RKO hit "Rio Rita".

One wonders if cinemagoers really enjoyed themselves on a night at the flicks if this rubbish was what was on offer. Stilted, variable accents and apart from the scenery hardly worth watching - a curio was all that it's worth for an hour or so of my life.

Having come directly from two weeks spent working on a narrowboat -- on the Grand Union, no less -- I was naturally curious about "The Water Gipsies", and its incidental depiction of 1930s working practices; how exactly, for instance, did one work a horse-drawn boat into a lock in the absence of any reverse gear? (The answer, as shown in this film at least, is that you let it glide in under momentum alone while judging the timing extremely carefully!) But I knew better than to expect documentary accuracy, although there weren't that many obvious howlers: the boat appeared, extravagantly, to be travelling without a cargo, making the sheeting-up of an empty hold rather superfluous, and I doubt that hanging around in the mouth of an open lock would have been any more popular then than it is now. Confusing a narrowboat with a river barge, however, can still reliably put up backs all down the canal!

Contrary to everything I'd heard about the film itself, on the other hand, I was very pleasantly surprised. This isn't a B-movie; it's a main feature with extensive sets and smooth production values, striking direction, and some jolly decent acting. Ann Todd is not only gorgeous but has more than enough talent to carry the story in her central role, and the only problem I could see with her accent is that the dialogue she is given occasionally fails to match the faded gentility of the family shown on screen -- it felt more like inconsistency in the script than in the actress. Meanwhile, there are some scenes that are extremely effective.

The film probably had an admitted advantage in that it was an adaptation of a book I never particularly liked; no sacred cows to be threatened. (In fact, I enjoyed it considerably more than I ever enjoyed the novel.) Like many classic literary works, the story in general gains by the condensation, and it is skilfully done, with characterisation established by economical, cinematic means in place of the original novel's devices. Much is conveyed via purely visual elements, such as the vacuum-cleaner flex yanked tight by an oblivious charwoman, or the single wordless shot of Ann Todd's face through a rain-lashed railway carriage window. Far from deserving the opprobrium ladled upon it, "The Water Gipsies" in my opinion is often not only beautiful but comes close to being a very good film indeed, and for IMDb purposes I found myself only a hair's-breadth short of rating it 8/10 overall.

What lets it down are the occasional clumsy lurches into sentimentalism or into melodrama. The sequence of Jane's wild-deer terror and Ernest's furious jealousy is genuinely unnerving; the cheap and poorly-staged river drama that follows plunges us straight into B-movie territory. The heavy-handed symbolism of placing Jane next to a series of meaningful movie posters is likewise over-milked. And the final shot is sappy beyond all credibility compared to the earlier canal scenes; although romanticised the film had hitherto retained a plausible rough edge, with Jane in sensible skirt and brogues seen heaving at heavy lock gates, or sharing a bed with Fred's blowsy mother.

Other scenes that left me slightly puzzled were the choice to show certain shots in the skittle contest but not -- for some reason -- the actual winning throws: artistic decision to focus on the spectators' reaction, or simply inability to reproduce the necessary skill? And it came as something of a jolt to gather only belatedly, from the following dialogue, that Jane's demand "Love me -- love me -- love me!" was intended to refer to a far more carnal relation than her appeal earlier in the scene "Can't you love me a little?"; censorship or not, one would have thought that this significant distinction might have been more clearly telegraphed.

"The Water Gipsies" falls short of greatness. But nonetheless it displays far more talent than I was led to expect, and left me curious to revisit the source work -- quite an achievement, when the latter was a book I disliked.