The Grissom Gang



The Grissom Gang is a 1971 American period gangster film directed and produced by Robert Aldrich from a screenplay by Leon Griffiths. The film is the second adaptation of the 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase; a previous version had been made in Britain in 1948. The cast includes Kim Darby, Scott Wilson, Tony Musante, Robert Lansing, Irene Dailey, Connie Stevens, Wesley Addy, Joey Faye and Ralph Waite.

Plot
In 1931, a Missourian meat heiress is kidnapped for ransom by a brutal gang, whose mentally handicapped nominal head (Scott Wilson) falls in love with her.

Cast

 * Kim Darby as Barbara Blandish
 * Scott Wilson as Slim Grissom
 * Tony Musante as Eddie Hagan
 * Robert Lansing as Dave Fenner
 * Irene Dailey as Gladys "Ma" Grissom
 * Connie Stevens as Anna Borg
 * Wesley Addy as John P. Blandish
 * Joey Faye as Woppy
 * Ralph Waite as Mace

Difference from 1948 adaptation
Previously filmed in England in 1948 under its original title, the central conceit was that the heiress, who felt stifled by her upper-class life-style, fell in love with the abductor and his comparative freedom to live his life on the edge. In this remake, Aldrich and Griffiths reversed this angle: the heiress merely strings him along in an attempt to escape. This version was also played more for laughs, in particular the outlandishly deranged behavior of the gang. The time period and locale have also been changed from 1948 New York in the first adaptation to 1931 Missouri in the remake.

Critical reception
At the time of its release, reviewers criticized the melodramatic extremes of the script and the fact that the cast is shown sweating throughout the entire film. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "You don't really have to think very much about The Grissom Gang to call it offensive, immoral and perhaps even lascivious, although to me, that word, when it is applied to an aim, is more of a promise than a threat. The Grissom Gang, like so many Aldrich films, ... carries lurid melodrama and violence to outrageous limits, for what often seems like the purely perverse hell of it ... Everybody sweats constantly, and nobody dies off-screen, always on-screen, in what the newspapers of the day used to describe as a hail of bullets ... Aldrich lets his performers, especially Miss Dailey and Wilson, behave as if they were in The Beverley Hillbillies."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was only slightly less harsh, saying, "We've been here before, most memorably with Bonnie and Clyde, but also with Roger Corman's seamy examination of the Barker family in Bloody Mama. Robert Aldrich's new film owes something to both. To Bonnie and Clyde for its convincing period feel, and to Bloody Mama for its treatment of a violent, sexually twisted family of criminals," adding "...the movie is deliberately melodramatic, and to such an overdone degree that (if you suspend your sanity for an hour or so) you can almost wallow in it. Everyone screams, shouts, flashes knives at each other and sweats a lot."

Variety also added, "Provided with a script that offers absolutely no insight into the inner lives of its people, director Robert Aldrich takes matters a step further by directing his actors in performances that strain the bounds of credulity. Wilson and Kim Darby, as the kidnapped girl, make stabs at more than one dimension, but when they indulge in caricatures of feeling, as they often do, they cancel out the rest of their work."

Modern critics hold the film in a slightly higher regard, with TimeOut saying "For one thing, the eponymous family, who kidnap '30s heiress Miss Blandish, are never glamorised but portrayed as a pathetic, ignorant bunch of grotesques; for another, as the petulant and spoilt heroine turns the sadistic and murderous Slim Grissom's love for her to her own cruelly humilating purposes, the film becomes an unsentimental exploration of perverse power-games played between two characters whose very different family backgrounds cannot conceal the latent vulnerability they both share. "

The film holds a 67% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Box office
The film earned $340,000 in North American rentals and $250,000 in other countries. It recorded an overall loss of $3,670,000. It had admissions of 239,768 in France.

DVD
The Grissom Gang was released to DVD by MGM Home Video on November 2, 2004 as a Region 1 widescreen DVD.

Legacy
In 2009 Empire Magazine named it #12 in a poll of the 20 Greatest Gangster Movies You've Never Seen* (*Probably)