The Grissom Gang

The Grissom Gang
Directed by	Robert Aldrich
Produced by	Robert Aldrich
Written by	Leon Griffiths
Based on	the novel by James Hadley Chase
Starring	Kim Darby Scott Wilson Tony Musante Robert Lansing Irene Dailey Connie Stevens Wesley Addy Joey Faye Ralph Waite
Music by	Gerald Fried
Cinematography	Joseph Biroc
Edited by	Michael Luciano Frank J. Urioste
Production company	The Associates & Aldrich Company
Distributed by	ABC Pictures 20th Century Fox (1971, original) MGM (2004, DVD)
Release date	May 28, 1971
Running time	128 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$3 million
Box office	$590,000

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.

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.

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.

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."