Regency rake meets femme fatale in Losey's first costume drama, set in early nineteenth-century England. A mercenary wastrel enters into an arranged marriage strictly to acquire the dowry, but just before the wedding, he meets the gypsy of the title, played with spirited intensity by Mercouri, in her first English-language role. Full of mutual deceit and tempestuous passion, their role-playing relationship echoes the power games of The Prowler, Eva and The Servant. And like the title characters in those films, Mercouri's gypsy embodies the figure of the outsider, the intruder who awakens the violence and sexuality concealed just below the surface of a rigid social system.