Cinema: Import, Mar. 5, 1951

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (Renown), made in England, purports to be a movie about U.S. gangsters. Adapted from a claptrap novel by Britain’s James Hadley Chase (real name: Rene Raymond), who once confessed cribbing from U.S. hard-boiled fiction, the picture outraged London (TIME, May 10, 1948). Censors howled that it was brutal, sadistic, sensual; critics slammed it as “a piece of nauseating muck.”

Last week a wave of shock ads (“No one under 16 will be admitted”) ushered the claptrap into Manhattan. New York critics brushed the picture off with amused disdain. Whether taken as an inept counterfeit of Hollywood gangster movies or a witless parody, No Orchids is so ludicrous that its thugs’ thinly disguised British accents seem minor imperfections.