Friday 12 January 2007
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)
I was going on yesterday about the injustice of classic films being missing in action on disc and really bad movies being available, and this is a fine case in point. This film is among the all-time stinkers of British film-making, yet there it is on its shiny DVD. Part of the reason it smells bad is that it may be a British movie, based on the notorious novel by James Hadley Chase, but all of the cast (apart from the imported male lead, Jack LaRue) are pretending to be Americans, with the worst assortment of accents imaginable. The violence of the book has been toned down, but the film still received really horrid reviews at the time, being described as 'something out of a sewer'. A kidnapped heiress falls for the dubious charms of the gangster and instead of her being brutally treated, we are asked to believe a story of doomed love -- padded out with excrutiatingly bad variety numbers from a so-called night club. The book had been regarded as unfilmable, so the awfulness of this first effort is no surprise; however it was in fact re-made in Hollywood in 1971 as "The Grissom Gang" and is a rare example of a re-make being the more watchable movie. Incidentally, British actress Linden Travers in the lead role here never made another film nor did the hopeless director. Carry-on regular Sid James has a bit part as a Chicago bartender. Unbelievable!
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Since James Hadley Chase, to use the nom de plume by which the author is best known, had not visited the USA but relied on a book on American slang to write
what was always his best-known and most popular novel, the 'smell' is perhaps
understandable. You may not know that Sid James, a South African Jew by birth,
was cast in minor gangster roles and later parts on the edge of the law because of
his appearance though, as a jobbing actor, he would take what was offered. He
became known as a comedian through appearing in the radio version of 'Hancock's Half-Hour' after which he rarely appeared in anything but comedy.
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