Miss Blandish: The Original Text

In my last post, the last of 2022, I clamored down the rabbit hole of texts and movies born of Miss Blandish’s sexual degradation recounted in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. (Need I mention that some literary scholars have opined that the meaning of “sanctuary,” the title of the Faulkner novel from which, everyone agrees, Chase took his novel’s plot line for Miss Blandish, is an allusion to the female genitalia? Well, that’s lurid enough!)

I also wondered aloud whether or not George Orwell, author of “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” his very famous essay of 1944 comparing the old school of British “crime” writing with the new brash, American style, had actually read the book. Several incidents that he discusses in his piece were not in the book that I read! Ah, but there are many editions and revisions to the Chase text, all described in this lengthy blog post. I tried in vain to find a copy of the original, first edition text of No Orchids, but only found collector’s copies priced at $500 or more. A more careful reading of the blog post, however, alerted me to the fact that the original text was republished in a Corgi paperback edition in 1961, available for free, upon registration, at the Internet Archive, here!

Well, I can declare categorically that George Orwell did NOT embroider on or imagine elements of the text one bit. Phew..! (I would be very upset to to find that Orwell could be so cavalier and careless.) No, the original 1939 text is a shocker, even today. The depiction of violence is very graphic. For example, early on in the novel, Slim, the murderous and psychopathic sexual deviant knifes to death a member of a rival gang from whom they are stealing Miss Blandish. He takes pleasure in watching him being tied up, screaming for mercy as Slim approaches, and then he slowly inserts his knife into the man’s guts. He sits down and sees the knife handle jiggling as the man writhes and cries out. “Take your time, pal,” he says. And Slim’s first rape of Miss Blandish is described in creepy detail. Yep, pretty sick.

The original text is free of technological anachronisms such as television and helicopters, and the original plot details actually make more sense than the revised story. There is also much more suspense, as in the later episode when the nightclub operator whom the Grissoms muscled out of his club, seeking revenge, manages to free Miss Blandish from her torture chamber. In the revised story, this episode is much abbreviated, but originally, it provided a great deal of tension: would he succeed in it? And this fellow, by the way, is the one who experiences an orgasm before dying of a knife thrust from Slim. (In my previous post, I incorrectly identified the victim as one of the small time hoods in the beginning of the book.)

One knock against Orwell remains, however. In his essay, he speculates that Miss Blandish kills herself because she has become so accustomed to Slim’s caresses that she cannot live without them. Absurd! It is is abundantly clear that Miss B. is a ruin of a human being, and she gives a long speech to her rescuer explaining why she does not wish to be reunited with her father, or really with anyone. Then she throws herself out a window to her death. As I noted in the previous post, however, that is the reason she kills herself in the 1948 film adaptation which totally inverts the psychology of the story.

I have read only one other book by James Hadley Chase, “The Things Men Do,” and I can only rate it as mediocre. Some might say that Miss Blandish was his best effort. It was his first, and it came to him, he claims, in a flash, written in a week or so. If you have a yen to get to know Miss Blandish’s story, I urge you to read only the 1939 text. If you have not, you cannot really say you have read No Orchids, and that’s what you want, isn’t it?

Gangs of New York

The neighborhood of Five Points, an intersection in lower Manhattan now occupied by the Federal Courthouse and Foley Square, is the setting of Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film, Gangs of New York. Basically a simple revenge tale, it attempts to impart epic stature to the history of rioting, mayhem, and ethnic gangs in NYC of the Civil War era.  The art direction is fantastic, almost too good.  Everything seems just right, too right.  Like a stage set, a movie set.  I wonder, did it really look like this?  I couldn’t shake myself of the feeling that it didn’t, that it was just too good to look at, too interesting to be believable, although I did love the costumes.

Daniel Day Lewis, an actor of amazing intensity, plays Bill Cutting, a Nativist, Know-Nothing, anti-immigrant gang leader who loves  to wreak violent havoc on poor Irish newcomers to America.  (He speaks with a Noo Yawk accent, and you expect him to come out with De Niro’s line from Taxi Driver:  You talkin’ to me?)  He regards himself as a “real American.”  Leonardo Di Caprio plays a young man who witnessed Cutting’s killing of his father during a legendary gang battle that established Cutting’s dominance in the Five Points when he was a young boy.  Sixteen years later the boy, now a man, returns, incognito, for revenge.  He insinuates himself into the good graces of Cutting, tries and fails to kill him, and finally forms a rival Irish gang.  In a final confrontation, he takes his revenge and slices up the killer of his father.  For some critics, this justifies the encomium, Shakespearean.

The movie is another love song to violence and gangs by an incorrigibly romantic director who seems bewitched by the notion that in violence, the essence of our humanity is laid bare.  Why not in gathering nuts to eat, I wonder?  Not so much fun for movie makers.   In the finale, the two gang leaders recognize themselves as having membership in a common tribe, the bounds of which transcend religious bigotry.  Yes, they are both violent thugs, and their world is crushed by the arrival of blue-coated Union troops that put down the draft riots that wracked NYC for five days.  (Largely Irish, the rioters were fueled by resentment that moneyed folks could buy an exemption to the draft for $300.  The history of racial integration in the area was ended when the mobs turned their anger on free blacks and lynched many of them.)  Oh for the days when men were men, killed with axes, knives, and clubs, and were not automatons in well-drilled ranks, with rifles and fixed bayonets. (The gang battles are depicted like confrontations between chivalrous, if brutal knights leading their loyal retainers.)  A few rioters go mad with rage and charge the troops – they are shot to pieces, and their deaths are portrayed as a martyrdom.

In the end, we are shown the graves of Cutting and the boy’s father, “Priest” Vallon, side by side, sharing a view of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Vague noises are made about how such people gave birth to our fair city.  Well, they were a part of its history, perhaps a forgotten part, as the narration says, but they no more built the city by thieving, brawling, whoring, and murdering than did Boss Tweed by perfecting his political machine and his “honest” grand larceny.  Or they all did, with a lot of others.  But preoccupied with the world-view of turf-obsessed thugs, Scorsese seems to believe that gangs like the Dead Rabbits and The Bowery Boys were, as the Marxists like to say of the proletariat, the true object of history.

Sequestro Caracas

“Sequestro Express” is a harrowing film about the ordeal of two affluent young people who are kidnapped in Caracas, Venezuela. The title translates as “Kidnap Express”. Watching the film is like being one of the victims, and it’s not a pleasant experience – the director was himself kidnapped at one time, so the emotional feel is intense. The female victim comes through with her life – she isn’t raped either – but as the lead to the film tells us, a kidnapping happens once every 60 minutes in Latin America, and most of the victims do not survive – “this is the story of just one of them.”

The criminals are sadistic and brutal, but they are human after all. They take calls from their kids and their parents while they are “working.” One of them wants to be an artist. Another is a bit of a thinker – he tells the woman victim that, yes, everyone gets robbed, but only the ones who “flaunt” their wealth get treated with such hatred. The police are corrupt and criminal themselves.

80% of the country lives in miserable poverty: As the director says at the end, the choice is simple – “Confront the beast, or invite it to dinner.” As he says in this fascinating interview:

…it was even for myself a real journey of education and understanding of the way that people – 80% of the people live in poverty in my country – the way they live, the way they think, and why this is the fastest growing crime in Latin America.”

The opening credit sequence of the film includes an aerial pan over the city showing images like the one above, and I think this one in particular encapsulates the idea behind the film. On the right, the sprawling, unplanned, crowded, ramshackle ghetto covering the hills that surround the city. On the left, the ordered, geometrical, spacious, flatlands of where the city of civil society, capitalism, and affluence is placed. [Unlike the USA, in Latin American cities, the well-to-do live in the center, the poor live in the outlying hills.] Two cities, two geographies, two terrains, both economically, socially, morally, medically…on and on. Can a society be a society and live this way?