Sky West and Crooked" was the only film to be directed by John Mills, and he was clearly keen to keep matters in the family. Not only did he cast his daughter Hayley in the starring role, he also based the script upon a story by his wife Mary Hayley Bell. Hayley had previously starred in another film based upon her mother's writing, "Whistle Down the Wind", although that film was directed by Bryan Forbes.
The film opens with a striking coup de cinema. We see a young girl sitting in an idyllic English country meadow- with a gun pointing straight at her. Then we see that the gun is being held by a young boy of her own age, and we relax momentarily, thinking the gun must be a toy, as the two children run off to play. (I wondered if this scene were based on a similar one in "Charade" from a few years earlier, in which a sinister-looking gun turns out to be a child's water-pistol). Then we hear a gunshot and we realise that the gun was not a toy after all. Some dreadful tragedy has occurred.
The rest of the film takes place some ten years later. We learn that the boy, whose name was Julian Dakers, accidentally shot himself dead while playing with a gun belonging to his father. The girl, whose name is Brydie White, is now seventeen, but has suffered from mental retardation ever since the accident. The film's British title, "Sky West and Crooked", derives from a dialect term- the film is set in a West Country village- used by local people to describe her condition. In the US the film was released as "Gypsy Girl", which is not quite accurate as Brydie is not herself a gypsy. The American title refers to her growing romantic friendship with a young gypsy man named Roibin Krisenki. Now I have known plenty of gypsies and none of them had such an exotic moniker. Most of them had quite normal English or Irish surnames- many, in fact, were called Smith. Bell, however, seems to have conceived of the gypsies as exotic, romantic figures; the ones in this film all still travel in horse-drawn wagons, although by 1965 real gypsies would probably have abandoned these in favour of modern touring caravans.
T S Eliot famously wrote of the Jacobean dramatist John Webster that he was "much possessed by death", and the same could be said of Mills and Bell in their making of this film. Brydie has a curious fascination with death and burial, spending much of her time sitting in the village churchyard where she encourages the local children to bury dead animals, much to the consternation of the vicar. Images of coffins, funerals and graveyards predominate throughout, giving the film a strangely creepy atmosphere at odds with the verdant landscapes and the bright sunshine of an English rural spring. (The film was shot in May in the Gloucestershire village of Little Badminton).
This death-imagery is not the only creepy thing about the film. I have in the past been an admirer of the acting of the young Hayley Mills but I felt that her performance here, although technically proficient, was inappropriate to the context of this particular film. She made Brydie seem far too young. Although Bridie is supposed to be seventeen, and Hayley herself was actually nineteen at the time, we never really get the impression that she is more than about twelve. This is not just a question of her arrested mental development. There is also the fact that her companions- one might even call them playmates- are much younger than her, and Hayley, who at this period of her life looked a lot younger than her years, invests her with such innocence that we perceive her not as a teenager but as a child, physically as well as mentally. This has implications for how we regard Roibin's interest in her, which seems something much more disturbing than the normal love of a young man for a young woman, which I think is how Mills and Bell intend us to see it. The scene in which the vicar helps this ill-matched couple to elope is not really the sort of behaviour one would expect from a man of the cloth.
For all his talent as an actor, John Mills was not, on the strength of this effort, a natural-born director, which is perhaps why he did not go on to make any more films. There is some attractive photography, but the story does not flow easily and drags in a number of places. The promise of that arresting opening sequence is not fulfilled and there are few other memorable scenes. "Whistle Down the Wind" is rightly remembered as a classic of the British cinema; "Sky West and Crooked" is not in the same class. 5/10
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