Highly Overrated But Still Good

A lot of fun.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

When this movie first appeared it was excoriated as vile, filthy, depraved, you name it. What a disappointment! The people who got in a lather must have based their indignation solely on the book, which IS very violent and disturbing. There is less violence in this movie than in the gangster films of the Thirties, especially Jimmy Cagney's, and less perversion than in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Miss Blandish, with her cut-glass debutante accent, exudes no passion, nor does her gangster lover. When they kiss, mushy romantic music plays! at one point the camera pans to a fireplace! This could be Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle for all the depravity going on. The script is tame and dull, the direction plodding, the acting terrible. Everyone tries to be very tough and American, but they've got Made in Twickenham stamped on their foreheads, and can't keep up their imitations of American accents without making a few slips (how many American gangsters' molls say "cahn't"?). Plus there are several nightclub acts which are, to use authentic American slang of the period, strictly from hunger.

At the time this was released, some 65 years ago, the critics mauled it and not just that, they were furious. The eminent reviewer, Dillys Powell, suggested it should have been awarded a 'D' certificate, for 'disgusting' and the censor later apologised for having mislead the public into seeing something they perhaps shouldn't have. Monthly Film Bulletin used the words, 'sickening', 'brutality','perversion' and 'sex & sadism'. Well, needless to say it doesn't live up to all that, though a tender reviewer on this site in 2006 slammed it as 'the toughest film I have seen'. It's British and based upon the infamous book of the same title by the Brit, James Hadley Chase and well worth seeing. You will be surprised at the violence and sexual reference, considering the time, but you will survive.

I was surprised by the consistent entertainment value of this movie. This psycho pseudo-noir is actually quite successful visually, the sort of film that begs you to hit the "mute" button. With the sound turned on the dialog and the attempts at acting tough by the brit-sissies playing American gangsters (who I admit are brutally butch looking) are both spectacularly, bad in a very disorienting, familiar way: though it precedes "Plan 9..." by 11 years, this movie sports serious (Ed) Wood. It has a similarly quirky charm.The one actual (expatriate) American in the movie, Jack La Rue, is almost as miscast as the Brits. This is odd considering his earlier, much more convincing work in The Story of Temple Drake, etc. One telling scene near the end, a nightclub routine almost as bizarre as Jim Carrey's thalidomide baby routine in the Clint Eastwood movie "Pink Cadilac," made me wonder if the whole film was a goof, intended to have a "camp" sensibility.

A famous British example of film noir, No Orchids for Miss Blandish centers around a psychopathic killer (Jack La Rue) who kidnaps and falls in love with heiress Linden Travers. Noirishly photographed by Gerald Gibbs, the movie was often stylishly directed, but suffered from an excess of often pointless, on-screen violence. The line-up of heavies also seemed disproportionate. The police were portrayed as ineffectual document dusters, leaving only a flawed private detective (rather weakly played by Hugh McDermott, not exactly the most charismatic of leading men) to offer a challenge. Over-emphatic comic relief provided by prissy Charles Goldner and nightclub comedian Jack Durant didn't help either, but I did enjoy the songs from Zoe Gail (and this, alas, is her only movie).