When this movie first appeared it was excoriated as vile, filthy, depraved, you name it. What a disappointment! The people who got in a lather must have based their indignation solely on the book, which IS very violent and disturbing. There is less violence in this movie than in the gangster films of the Thirties, especially Jimmy Cagney's, and less perversion than in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Miss Blandish, with her cut-glass debutante accent, exudes no passion, nor does her gangster lover. When they kiss, mushy romantic music plays! at one point the camera pans to a fireplace! This could be Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle for all the depravity going on. The script is tame and dull, the direction plodding, the acting terrible. Everyone tries to be very tough and American, but they've got Made in Twickenham stamped on their foreheads, and can't keep up their imitations of American accents without making a few slips (how many American gangsters' molls say "cahn't"?). Plus there are several nightclub acts which are, to use authentic American slang of the period, strictly from hunger.
