Kino Lorber Blu-ray release.

BY NICHOLAS ANEZ

When No Orchids for Miss Blandish premiered in London in 1948, it created controversy that extended all the way to British Parliament. The Monthly Film Bulletin called the movie “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion and sex ever shown on a cinema screen.” The Saturday Pictorial called it “a piece of nauseating muck.” The Observer’s reviewer wrote: “This film has all the morals of an alley cat and the sweetness of a sewer.” Some politicians were also offended. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food said that the film “was likely to pervert the minds of the British people.” Eventually, the British Board of Film Censors was compelled to offer an apology for approving the film’s production.

Attempts to release the movie in the United States by distributor Richard Gordon were met with threats by the New York Censor Board as well as the Customs Department to confiscate it. Gordon had to bring the movie into the country through New Orleans but it would still take three years of bargaining and the removal of 12 minutes of objectionable scenes to obtain approval for exhibition. Nevertheless, the edited version was still greeted with harsh reviews. Time called it, “ludicrous claptrap from a claptrap novel.” The New York Times chastised it as “an awkward attempt on the part of the English to imitate Hollywood’s gangster formula.”

The critical disdain has never stopped. In the multi-volume reference work, The Motion Picture Guide, Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross write “This a sick exercise in sadism (and) is about as wretched as they come.” The annual Halliwell’s Film Guide summarizes the movie as “hilariously awful (and) one of the worst films ever made.”

The movie is based upon the 1939 novel of the same name by British author James Hadley Chase that was called everything from pulp trash to borderline pornography. When it was published in America three years later, it received equally terrible reviews with many critics accusing the author of plagiarizing William Faulkner’s 1931 novel, Sanctuary. The novel concerns the daughter of a wealthy Kansas City businessman who is kidnapped by the notorious Grisson gang, led my Ma Grisson and her psychopathic son, Slim; she is subsequently subjected to repeated rapes by Slim while in a drug-induced stupor. (Note: when Robert Aldrich directed his film version in 1971, he changed the name from Grisson to Grissom for The Grissom Gang.)

After several attempts to film the novel were aborted by the BFFC, producer George Minter signed playwright St. John Clowes to write a script that eventually was approved. The script eliminated much of the novel’s sleaze but, as it turned out, not enough. Clowes, who had directed one previous film, also signed on to direct. Casting proved to be difficult because of the novel’s notoriety. After several Hollywood actresses refused the role, Minter signed British actress Linden Travers who had played Miss Blandish in the London stage version which had been a huge success in 1942. (As in the novel, Miss Blandish’s first name is never revealed.) For the role of Slim Grisson, Minter hired Hollywood actor Jack La Rue whose most famous role had ironically been as the gangster/rapist called Trigger in The Story of Temple Drake, the 1933 film version of Sanctuary. Due to that film’s infamy, La Rue’s career had subsequently stalled and he had been reduced to playing bit parts until he accepted the role of Slim Grisson.

Clowes changes the setting of the story from 1930s Kansas City to 1940s New York City and converts the sordid tale into a love story. Slim Grisson is still a killer but is also a sensitive gangster who has always had a torch for the heiress. Instead of being held prisoner and sexually abused, Miss Blandish chooses to voluntarily stay with her captor and become his lover. The other members of the Grisson gang remain murderous thugs who become furious over Slim’s refusal to demand ransom from his paramour’s father; this will lead to carnage within the gang. Mr. Blandish also undergoes some changes from a cold patriarch to a caring father who longs for his daughter’s return. Dave Fenner, the private detective of the novel, becomes a wise-cracking reporter who discovers the culpability of the Grisson gang and becomes their target. Meanwhile, the police are determined to end the gang’s reign of terror. With all of these forces against their alliance, the lovers’ plan to escape to another country is doomed.

Regarding the controversy, the film contains numerous scenes of depraved criminals committing acts of brutality along with periodic scenes of suggestive sexual interludes among various characters. What particularly shocked British gentry was the suggestion that an aristocratic woman would not only voluntarily elect to have a sexual relationship with someone beneath her social class but would actually enjoy it. This was simply unacceptable. Also, the film’s depiction of a gang of killers with no redeeming qualities angered social reformers who believed that lawbreakers were products of their environment and could be rehabilitated if taken away from such milieu. Furthermore, many British film critics disapproved of the popularity of Hollywood gangster films and resented the idea of a home-based film emulating this despised genre. Thus, the condemnation of the film was at least in part due to factors other than the quality of the movie.