The Grissom Gang
With Kim Darby, Scott Wilson, Tony Musante.
US, 1971, 35mm, color, 128 min.
Print source: Disney
Set during what must have been the muggiest Kansas City summer of the 1920s, The Grissom Gang,in unflinching detail, follows as a tribe of sweat-soaked, beret-wearing cretins carry out a string of kidnappings, rapes and murders. When the runt of the litter, Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson, in one of the great slimeball performances), falls in love with one of the family’s victims, the debutante Barbara Blandish (Kim Darby), tensions erupt and the entire criminal operation loses its composure. What follows is a deranged black comedy of psychosexual possession filmed at an uncomfortably intimate proximity, as well as a cultural study of a warped Prohibition-era heartland where new money holds dangerous sway over the law. Even in such a garish landscape, however, Aldrich’s principles of moral relativism are intact and pulled to their breaking point as exploitation gradually gives way to pathos. The film’s audaciously tender finale kept audiences away, and the financial failure ultimately caused the closure of Aldrich Studios.
