Originally intended as a musical, Ray's wild gypsy drama combines the director's fascination with the folkloric and sympathy for outcasts with the bold formal and compositional possibilities of widescreen and color. A vast amount of sociological research about American gypsy culture went into the script, and Ray obviously intended the film as a kind of ethnographic portrait of an “alien” culture, but authenticity was displaced by Hollywood spectacle, and the film is a hot and gaudy plunge into the passions of an “exotic” clan of gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Jane Russell is dark, flashing, and breasty as the hot-blooded Annie Caldash, locked into an arranged marriage to a man from a rival tribe of gypsies (Cornel Wilde). Ray's sense of freedom is everywhere apparent: a subjective shot suddenly turns the 'Scope image upside down, splashes of brassy color pump up the palette, and realism keeps giving way to mid-fifties artifice.
—James Quandt

Print note: The full color spectrum is no longer present in the existing negative. But with reds, oranges, and golds remaining, there is the chance of an even gaudier, brassier experience! We look forward to Sony Pictures' eventual restoration of the film.