Foreign News: Why, John!

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London film critics and similar wardens of British taste hardly knew which way to look. After years of parapet-watching against the baser sort of Hollywood gangster movies, a gangster film popped into town that was really sending British eyebrows up. What hurt like a slug in the back: No Orchids for Miss Blandish was British-made.

No Orchids was about U.S. gangsters, all right. British Author Rene Raymond, whose bestseller of the same title had sold a million copies, had never been to the U.S. He had, however, read a lot of U.S. pulps, and his dialogue tried to catch the tone faithfully. Samples from the movie: "Look, Fenner, don't put the squeak into Slim." "Ya, I'd like to plug him in the guts." Most of the sequences involved fairly normal business like gun battles, kidnapings, dopings, and Miss Blandish's suicide. But there was one scene (where Miss Blandish's fiance is being kicked to death just out of camera sight) that brought gasps from London audiences.

The critics gasped, too. "This film," said the Observer, "has all the morals of an alley cat and the sweetness of a sewer." Said the Sunday Pictorial: "A piece of nauseating muck." Wrote Steven Watts in the Sunday Express: "The worst film I have ever seen." From the august Manchester Guardian came utter damnation: "Thoroughly un-British."

Dr. Edith Summerskill, parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Food, shrilled that the film was "likely to pervert the minds of the British people." The Bishop of London, as chairman of the Public Morality Council, sent a protest. Watch committees from the provinces hustled to London to pass judgment. Last week, after threat of banning, the picture was pruned a bit. Out went the kicking scene, also one where a gangster smashed a decanter across the face of an unoffending barkeep. However, the producers promised that, for export, No Orchids would remain unexpurgated.