10 Most Sympathetic Movie Kidnappers And Hostage Takers

6. Slim Grisson (Grissom) - No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948)/The Grissom Gang (1971)

It was always going to be a controversial choice for a 1940s film. In his essay on moral trends in crime fiction, George Orwell described James Hadley Chase€™s 1939 novel No Orchids For Miss Blandish (in comparison to the late Victorians€™ love of Raffles, the gentleman thief): "In a book like No Orchids one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion." On its transfer to the screen as an ersatz Brit attempt at US film noir, the British Film Institute€™s Monthly Film Bulletin damned it as "the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen." It plays a whole lot tamer today - though it€™s no less politically incorrect. In keeping with English novelist Hadley Chase€™s (sometimes successful) attempts to replicate hardboiled American fiction, the overwrought pot-boiler is awash with fake US accents and New York street scenes apparently shot in alleyways off of Wardour Street. Oddly, the only American actor (wannabe tough guy Jack La Rue as kidnapper Slim Grisson) speaks in strange faux-European tones. The plot is entirely about the abduction of society girl Miss Blandish (Linden Travers) by the Grisson family, and how she survives being held hostage. Peculiarly, for an age and a censorship system that permitted no sexually explicit subject matter, you don€™t have to read much between the lines to realise she helps Slim overcome impotency by eventually allowing him to seduce (or, more accurately, rape) her. As the cops move in and Slim is gunned down, our heroine is so distraught that she throws herself to her death. It€™s amusing to note that the BBFC felt moved to issue a retrospective apology for actually passing the movie. But the story doesn€™t end there. In the early 1970s, hard-edged Hollywood pulpmeister Robert Aldrich - whose range extended from bleak fifties noir Kiss Me, Deadly and convicts-at-war actioner The Dirty Dozen to Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, in which old starlets went gaga - had another crack at the story. The Grissom Gang was an even more lurid take, with Miss Blandish (Kim Darby) painted as a calculating dame prepared to play with the besotted but deranged Slim€™s (Scott Wilson) affections in order to escape and survive. It was no less misanthropic than the 1940s version, but met with less controversy in an age when exploitation movies broke all kinds of taboos and the brutalist Peckinpah was briefly a star director in the New Hollywood. The character of Ma Grissom was also redolent of matriarchal gang leader Ma Barker, who provided the blueprint for Shelley Winters in the B-movie Bloody Mama around that time. But the overall psychological message of The Grissom Gang was the same: some women, under duress, can learn to tolerate their abductors and rapists, if not outright love them.