“Kidnapping and bloodshed in Kansas during the early part of the 1930s provide the subject of Robert Aldrich's (The Grissom Gang), which he has managed to bring off without blighting himself by arousing too many comparisons with Bonnie and Clyde and Bloody Mama, although both these precepts have a tendency to come to mind as the gang-grief and the down-at-mouth humour unreel. The film is a remake of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, an eyebrow-raiser of several decades ago, from a novel of that name by James Hadley Chase whose literary offerings have also proved of cinematic value in France.
“Sociologically, to be as serious as possible, one can say that the Aldrich version makes a nice point about snobbery at the end, when the kidnaped girl's father doesn't welcome her rescue with open arms but declares that she would have been better off dead because she has given her body to a hoodlum. It's an attitude that has by no means perished from the earth. And it carries a sickening punch still, because the slow-flowering relationship between little Miss Blandish (Kim Darby) and the retarded and sweaty and weepy Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson) is a curiously touching affair at all of the moments when the two players have not been permitted and conceivably encouraged to ham it up too much....
“The camera of Joseph Biroc and the art direction of James Dowell Vance allow a kind of bloody lyricism to come through from time to time, and it is fun to see the ancient automobiles, as well as the sun-baked California locations which serve quite nicely, and the ritzy all-purpose love nest which is cluttered with the expensive vulgarities of the era but has window curtains that open upon a solid brick wall--shades of Phantom of the Opera and The Collector. Indeed, although the gang's all there and everybody pitches in, the real success of the piece is the offbeat love story.” --Gordon Gow, Films and Filming