I guess the censors were on a lunch break when this film came before them. Or perhaps the Brits didn't have a censorship program like we had."No Orchids for Miss Blandish" is a film ahead of its time, for sure, one filled with brutality, sex, and implied rape. Apparently upon its release it caused a big hullabaloo. Various councils banned the film and the lead censor had to apologize! The story concerns a woman with an insanely rich father, the aforementioned Miss Blandish (Linden Travers) whose $100,000 diamonds are stolen, she is kidnapped, and her boyfriend is killed (in an awful scene) by thugs led by Slim (Jack LaRue). Though she has witnessed a murder and there is pressure for him to kill her, Slim returns the diamonds to her and tells her to leave. He's fallen in love with her, and she with him. This leads to lots of problems.There are so many murders and people turning on one another in this film that I lost count. The story for me was highly implausible, with not enough fleshing out of the characters to make their actions believable.Despite the fact that this is supposed to be an American gangster story, it had a distinctive British feel to it. The acting was good, even though apparently it was a career-wrecker for some of the performers, Linden Travers being among them.Not what I was expecting by a long shot and for me it was short on characterizations and long on violence. Still, it's worth seeing as an artifact of not only British cinema, but of its time.

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've always tended to link three films together in that they were all released around the same time and all aroused controversy. The three titles were 'The Outlaw', 'Forever Amber' and 'No Orchids For Blandish'. Eventually I saw them all though long after their initial 'shock' value had evaporated. 'No Orchids For Miss Blandish' eluded me the longest and I have, in fact, only just caught up with it on DVD. Overall it is slightly risible in that it seems to be asking the audience to accept a string of second-rate British actors as American; in order to do this all money is spoken of in terms of dollars, dough and/or bucks and the police wear US cop uniforms. Other than that little effort is made - or if it is it is woefully inadequate - in terms of accents and ironically the one genuine American in the cast, lead Jack LaRue, sounds more English than American. Leading lady and eponymous Miss Blandish Linden Travers looks remarkably like Moira Lister (who was 23 at the time and actually appeared in three films in 1948) and fails to convince that she would succumb to Stockholm syndrome in nothing flat and was possibly a role model for the real life Patty Hearst who followed suit in real life much later. Though more embarrassing than entertaining it is watchable at least once.

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).