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The Grissom Gang

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Director
  
Robert Aldrich

Story by
  
James Hadley Chase

Duration
  

Country
  
United States

7/10
IMDb

Genre
  
Crime, Drama

Initial DVD release
  
November 2, 2004

Language
  
English

The Grissom Gang movie poster

Writer
  
James Hadley Chase
,
Leon Griffiths

Release date
  
May 28, 1971

Cast
  
Kim Darby
(Barbara Blandish),
Scott Wilson
(Slim Grissom),
Tony Musante
(Eddie Hagan),
Robert Lansing
(Dave Fenner),
Connie Stevens
(Anna Borg),
Wesley Addy
(John P. Blandish)

Similar movies
  
Adventures in Babysitting
,
The Thieves
,
Muerte de un quinqui
,
Fake-Out
,
The Edge of the World
,
Piano 17

Tagline
  
The psychotic killer, the young heiress...the kidnapping that becomes a love story.

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.

Contents

The Grissom Gang movie scenes

Robert aldrich the grissom gang episode 1


Plot

The Grissom Gang movie scenes

In 1931, a Missourian meat heiress is robbed by three men, who panic after murdering her boyfriend and kidnap her. At their hideout, the three are ambushed and killed by Eddie Hagan, who happened to witness the crime, and the rest of the notorious Grissom Gang.

The Grissom Gang movie scenes

Barbara Blandish is held captive by the gang, including Slim Grissom, a mentally handicapped thug who falls in love with her. Ma Grissom, the gang's boss, sends a ransom note to the girl's father, John P. Blandish, demanding a million dollars for her return. But she has no intention of returning Barbara, and the plan to kill her meets the disapproval of Ma's husband Doc.

The Grissom Gang movie scenes

Private detective Dave Fenner is hired by Barbara's father as weeks go by. After at first insulting Slim as a "halfwit" and repelling his advances, Barbara realizes that the only thing keeping her alive is his desire for her, Slim vowing to kill any gang member who harms her. She reluctantly becomes Slim's lover.

The Grissom Gang movie scenes

Nightclub singer Anna Borg has no idea what became of her boyfriend, one of the kidnappers who got killed. She pulls a gun on Eddie, who lies that Anna's boyfriend ran off with another woman. Anna allows herself to be seduced by Eddie, who then murders two men with knowledge of the crime.

Months go by. Fenner, out of ideas, poses as a theatrical agent who can help Anna's singing career. He gets her talking about past criminal associations and learns where the missing girl might be. A furious Eddie kills Anna, then goes after Barbara only to have Slim stab him to death. Ma uses a machine gun to fight police and kills her husband Doc when he tries to surrender. Slim dies in a hail of bullets, but when Barbara weeps over him, her disgusted father walks away.

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
  • Don Keefer as Doc
  • 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 Beverly 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)

    References

    The Grissom Gang Wikipedia
    The Grissom Gang IMDb The Grissom Gang themoviedb.org