No Orchids For Miss Blandish – 88 Films

Director: St John L. Clowes
Script: St John L. Clowes
Cast: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermolt, Linden Travers, Walter Crisham, Leslie Bradley, Zoe Gail, Jack Durrant, Lilli Molnar, Charles Goldner, Sidney James
Running time: 103 minutes
Year: 1948
Certificate: PG

One of the most controversial British films of the 1940s, No Orchids for Miss Blandish was a film that was controversial more for what it set out to do rather than the end result. Based on the James Hadley Chase novel and, like most of Chase’s work, it is a British take on American pulp. A kind of ripoff of Sanctuary by William Faulkner, about an heiress who is taken by the grotesque Grisson crime family, it even uses Jack LaRue, who played the equivalent role to his Slim Grisson in the Sanctuary adaptation The Story of Temple Drake. However, it also adds a Ma Barkeresque gangster matriarch, Ma Grisson (here played by Lilly Molnar). However, the film was seen as outrageous, because here was a British film that set out to be as American as possible. That it was seen as indecent and crude for something British to set out to be ‘American’, especially something as vulgar as an American gangster thriller. The film is based on a watered down play adaptation of the book, itself a watering down of Sanctuary. And despite importing LaRue, most of the cast are doing accents. Scot Hugh McDermott and Geordie Linden Travers are the leads, and the role of the barman is played by Sid James, in one of his early roles before the South African actor became cinema’s favourite Cockney lech. It is far less brutal than say White Heat, but because it was made in Britain, it was treated as something lowbrow.

Part of a run of American-set British noir, almost all of which feature Sid James – Joe Macbeth (1954), Wicked As They Come (1956), The Story of Esther Costello (1957), it’s set in an imaginary version of America where Roy Rogers posters indicate this is the US, mac, okay.

Later adapted to a more rural and genuinely American milieu as Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang (1971) with Kim Darby and Scott Wilson as more cornfed versions of Blandish and Slim, this is set in an imaginary America, a panto America, of fedoras and cops with guns, and interminable cabaret shows. But it creates a world that feels different from the cheapest and most chipboard of American noirs. There is a serviceable turn from LaRue, who in terms of American imports in the UK, is hardly Dane Clark or Cesar Romero, or Paul Henreid, or any of the similar US actors who Hammer imported for their noirs. Travers, the sister of Bill Travers, and probably best remembered for being Mrs. Toddhunter in The Lady Vanishes (1938), is a bit of a cipher, who could be cold and calculating, but is portrayed as a tragic heroine. However, it is such a fascinating piece of cinematic pulp, a fairytale of America. The equivalent of kids playing gangsters. It’s set in a city that’s not quite Kansas or New York, but a strange melange. Like the America of spaghetti westerns or the Britain of Edgar Wallace krimis, this 40s America is a playground, a world unto itself. This does undercut its attempt at tragic melodrama, but the world it creates is so flawed yet so beguiling. It makes this and the other films in this mould (some of which Indicator are releasing in their Columbia Noir set of British films) so interesting. They are to American gangster films and noir what Wimpy and Cliff Richard are to American fast food and rock and roll.

Film:

Disc/Package: