‘No Orchids for Miss Blandish’: The controversial British film dubbed ‘the worst movie ever made’
Nobody sets out to make a bad movie on purpose, but the best of intentions can nonetheless yield the most disastrous of results, something the cast and crew of No Orchids for Miss Blandish experienced first-hand when their film was burned at the stake and buried six feet under by critics.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by James Hadley Chase, the English writer penning an American-set tale of gangsters laced with sexually explicit prose and gruesome violence proved to be hugely controversial upon its publication in 1939, with George Orwell voicing his displeasure of its “cruelty and sexual perversion”.
Undeterred, a feature-length production was mounted after being adapted into a stage play in 1942. Seeking to emulate the atmosphere and intensity of noir cinema in what was intended to be the first of many movies shot in the United Kingdom but telling stories that unfold in the United States, St John Legh Clowes was clearly hugely invested in the project, considering he wrote, produced, and directed the film.
Linden Travers stars as the title character, who finds herself kidnapped by a band of small-time criminals with their eyes on moving up the ladder. However, their efforts are thwarted when a rival gang led by Jack La Rue’s cruel and unflinching Slim Grisson decide that they’d be much better suited to holding a hostage with a million-dollar ransom fee instead. In turn, Hugh McDermott’s private investigator, Dave Fenner, is hired to solve the case, unaware that Miss Blandish and Slim have fallen for each other during her captivity.
Before it had even been released, it was clear that No Orchids for Miss Blandish was going to cause much in the way of pearl-clutching, with a newspaper article outlining how a 45-second kissing scene had failed to make it past the local censorship board. Asking that 20 seconds be removed to make it more palatable to a wider audience, the production team had to reshoot the entire scene at the then-princely cost of £3,000.
According to the BBFC, cuts were required “totalling 114 feet to two of the reels”, while it was ruled that there should be “no admission to persons under 16 unless accompanied by an adult”. Anointed as “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen” by April 1948’s Monthly Film Bulletin, No Orchids for Miss Blandish was further denigrated by Labour MP Tom Driberg as “a disgrace to the British film industry”.
Not that it mattered when the film was finally screened to the public, where it was summarily dismissed as being an awful affront to the medium. A smoky noir crime thriller made entirely by British creatives was an interesting attempt at replicating what their Stateside counterparts were doing, albeit one that proved to be entirely fruitless when it was unanimously trashed.
Retrospective analysis hasn’t been any kinder, with former television executive Leslie Halliwell blasting it as “one of the worst films ever made”, even if the initial controversy becomes altogether funnier when the BBFC’s modern guidelines have No Orchids for Miss Blandish rated as a mild PG, simply for “mild violence and threat”.
