Past Misdeeds: No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


It looks like a certain thing for a trio of would-be gangsters: grab the incredibly valuable jewellery of millionaire's daughter Miss "I don't need no stinking first name" Blandish (Linden Travers) while she and her fiancée are driving through dark country roads on the way to a roadhouse. As it goes with things that are certain, the robbery plan ends with a dead fiancée, two dead would-be kidnappers and Miss Blandish kidnapped by the last surviving gangster, a certain Bailey (Leslie Bradley). Oops.

Bailey drives his victim to a country shack, where he is planning on, well, shacking up for a while and doing Miss Blandish harm. Just when he is about to rape her, members of the Grisson gang, who learned of Bailey's plans and whereabouts by ways too complicated to explain, appear like a particularly inappropriate sort of cavalry. Their leader, Slim Grisson (Jack La Rue), decides to kill off Bailey and kidnap Miss Blandish (and her jewellery) for himself.

But a strange thing happens to the hardened gangster once his booty (human and monetary) is safely stashed away at the club he owns. Slim falls in love with his victim, even becoming willing to risk the wrath of his partner/boss Ma Grisson (Lilli Molnar) - who doesn't actually seem to be related to him - for said love. When Slim tells Miss Blandish to take her jewellery and just go on home, it turns out that he's not the only one who's in love here. Clearly, that sort of mutual feeling can not end well in a noir.

At the time the British noir No Orchids for Miss Blandish came out, it seems to have caused a minor scandal by flaunting British censorship rules towards filmic violence (and probably sex) enough to end the career of its director, the excellently named St. John Legh Clowes and its female lead Linden Travers. From my modern perspective, this, like a lot of things causing censors to foam at the mouth, seems more than just a bit overblown. Sure, conceptually the film's scenes of violence are a bit more directly visceral than was typical for its time, but Clowes’s execution of those scenes is so unconvincing, with fists that miss bellies by miles and bullets that are so clearly never shot no audience member (many of whom will have lived through various kinds of real violence during World War II, one presumes) can have been shocked by what's happening on screen.

I suspect that it's the sexual content that broke the film's neck anyhow, seeing as the amount of innuendo and the number of scenes where the film is basically stating "the characters are now going to have premarital sex while the camera's not looking" reminds of the raunchier Hollywood pre-code films I've seen.

But really, it's neither the sex nor the violence that makes No Orchids as interesting a film as it is, it's the peculiar way it goes about its business of being a British noir. Most of the British noirs I've seen were putting their efforts into taking the aesthetics and philosophy of the Hollywood noir and putting them into a decidedly British setting, with decidedly British characters and exploring decidedly British themes. It's none of that for No Orchids. Like the novels of James Hadley Chase (one of which this is based on), the film tries its damndest to pretend it is an American noir, setting its story in the USA yet still casting - apart from Jack La Rue's ersatz-Bogart and Walter Crisham's ersatz-Widmark - British actors for the roles.

This lets No Orchids take place in a particularly strange place - a USA where everyone tries for a different kind of badly done American accent to stiffly utter (often rather weird) dialogue full of off-key americanisms in, frequently while wearing clothes that are clearly supposed to be American-style, but actually look like the clothes people wear in classic gangster films as recreated by a mad tourist. This whole aspect of the movie has a highly alienating effect, putting a distance between a modern viewer and the film that makes emotional involvement near impossible. It's all much too artificial and strange to be immersive.

This effect is even further heightened by a script confusing and difficult to believe even by noir standards, and which oozes so much puppy-like excitement about aping all aspects of American noir it ever put its eyes on it's impossible to take it seriously at all. The film makes no attempt to make the sudden love between Slim and Miss believable even in the slightest, and instead puts them into scenes of bizarre domesticity that can't help but leave one with the feeling Clowes either had a very peculiar sense of humour and was trying to have the audience on, or is an alien only vaguely familiar with the idea and ideal of love. This sort of thing sure makes for an interesting film, but also left me giggling throughout the "dramatic" climax that - I think - is supposed to jerk a few tears.

So, by the standards of how a "good" film is supposed to be, No Orchids For Miss Blandish is pretty much a total loss. However, as a film that takes a by the time well-developed style of filmmaking and makes it weird through its own sheer wrong-headedness and an insistence on imitation as if it were a broken mirror, it's absolutely brilliant. As regular readers of this column and my blog know, there's not much I love better in a movie than the ability to present itself as part of a different world than the one I come from. No Orchids For Miss Blandish achieves that effect effortlessly, while also providing some very pretty pictures to look at (say what you will about Clowes's direction, but he sure knew how to do "pretty fake"), horrible musical numbers and "comic" interludes to be disturbed by, as well as psychosexual nonsense to shake one's head about.


For a film that is trying so hard to be like other films, No Orchids For Miss Blandish is very much only like itself.

Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)

The US secret services get wind the mysterious German (though that word never falls) spy and saboteur Reiner (?) is coming to Panama, and given the timing with an American fleet to make its way through the Canal shortly, to do something rather dangerous and dastardly against the future war effort. A US agent contacts Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) - who has gone undercover as a merchant in fine Panama hats - with the news. However, before he can give any hints concerning the identity of Reiner, the spy dies from a poisoned cigarette right in front of Chan.

Ironically, it’s this murder method that enables Chan to reduce his pool of suspects to a manageable number of people, all of whom came to Panama City on the same plane; less fortuitously, these are all highly suspicious people: there’s local cabaret owner Senor Manolo (Jack La Rue), a man so suspicious I’m not clear why he has never been arrested before nor why anyone would actually trust him with even the tiniest piece of information, Kathi Lenesch (Jean Rogers, not even trying to do an accent), a young woman with some secret or other that makes her susceptible to some of Manolo’s wishes, the absurdly British writer Cliveden Compton (Lionel Atwill), Egyptian cigarette merchant and part-time sneak Achmed Halide (Frank Puglia), German scientist Dr. Rudolph Grosser (Lionel Royce) who, as we will soon learn, likes to play with rats infected with bubonic plague, Miss Jennie Finch (Mary Nash), a middle-aged American schoolteacher on the first adventure of her life, and engineer Richard Cabot (Kane Richmond), a man so boring he can’t even be a red herring and must be innocent; also, the film’s romantic lead.

Chan has his work cut out for him, but it will take a bit of time to sort through everybody’s suspicious actions and secrets, to take care of the dead bodies Reiner leaves, and to avoid getting too perturbed by the over-excited help of second son Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen Yung).

I’ve already laid down my thoughts regarding the racial politics of the better Charlie Chan film in my last write-up of a film in the series (or at least the series before the character got into the hands of Monogram), The Black Camel, and what I wrote about the earlier film still holds nine years later, now with Sidney Toler having donned the yellow-face, and the film still treating an American Chinese as its hero. Actually, at this stage, the inclusion of actual American Chinese Victor Sen Yung looks like more positive progress for the series. Despite the character mainly having comic relief (and accidentally stumbling over hints) functions, Jimmy is allowed a degree of dignity not exactly typical of Asian actors in this period in Hollywood – while he’s hapless, Jimmy isn’t hopeless, and he’s also courageous, daring, and clearly doing his best fighting the good fight. He’s also – at least for my tastes – quite unlike a lot of comic relief characters by being actually funny and sympathetic instead of a hateful monstrosity that needs to die but never does.

It helps Charlie Chan in Panama’s case that the script by John Larkin and Lester Ziffren does have a nice line in funny dialogue, zipping through a film that otherwise is a serious war (or pre-war for you Americans) mystery/spy movie which features some elements I wouldn’t have expected of a movie that’s part of that corner of Hollywood that was – thanks to various political pressures - quite squeamish about naming enemy country names at the time.  I find one émigré character’s fear of being sent back to what’s left of her home country after “the invaders” now own it and ending up in a concentration camp quite a remarkable thing to hear, for example. There’s also the film’s obvious surety that the United States’ entry into the War can only be a matter of time, but that’s really the film taking on a (realistic) propagandist role of preparing its audience for the inevitable, censors who fear calling Germany by name notwithstanding. It’s quite an enlightening watch if you care for the idea of genre films as mirrors of the anxieties and obsessions of their times; in this case, the mirror turns out to be quite a direct and political one.

Apart from that cultural historical aspect, Charlie Chan in Panama is also a fine little mystery/spy thriller, as a Fox production still able to avail itself of a degree of production values, and even actually decent library footage, with a generally fine cast (even though I preferred the more charismatic and wry Ohland to Toler’s a bit blander Chan) doing good, professional work, and sure-handed, zippy, and often atmospheric direction by Norman Foster.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,mystery,spies,norman foster,sidney toler,jean rogers,lionel atwill,mary nash,victor sen yung,jack la rue

On WTF: No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948)

Once maligned for its violent and sexual content, this peculiar British production now recommends itself through its wrong-headed attempts at pretending to be American by any means necessary, even if it means hiring Jack La Rue playing not-Humphrey Bogart.

If you're interested to know how that turned out for No Orchids For Miss Blandish just click on through to this week's column at WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,noir,wtf,st. john legh clowes,jack la rue,linden travers,other places