I saw Joseph Losey’s The Gypsy and The Gentleman on television sometime in the Seventies, and thought to myself, Wow, this is NOT your typical costume drama – cutting, bizarre (that finale in the river!), cynical, unromantic. A movie that begs for a cult it has never achieved.

Losey: “I had decided that we should make an extravagant melodrama and at the same time try and present something of the real feeling of the Regency period where there were no toilets, and people bathed once a week if they were lucky, in a tub, and the gentlemen, when they got drunk, pissed in the fireplace. Of a period that was cruel and dirty and not just lovely and elegant — with brutal boxing matches and all the rest.”