The Grissom Gang movie review (1971)
Why this sort of material should be fascinating to American directors just now is hard to say. John Frankenheimer, for example, covered similar backwoods territory in "I Walk the Line," and now comes Aldrich. The one thing Aldrich has going for him, however, is a fine sense of depraved melodrama. He seems at home working with characters who come out of the Gothic novel via Screen Romances, and his early films in this genre include "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and the gruesome pseudo-ghost story, "The Legend of Lylah Clare."
Even "The Grissom Gang," which looks like a 1930s gangster movie at first, is really in the Gothic tradition. Aldrich keeps his camera inside a lot of the time; there are a few barns, a few roads and a few wheat fields, but most of the film was shot in sound stages, and there's a nice symbolic moment where the kidnapped girl pulls back the draperies in her room and finds a brick wall instead of a window. Aldrich is trying to work his way into the minds of his weirdly assorted cast of characters; he doesn't want to see them as symbols of a particular moment in history, as Arthur Penn did in "Bonnie and Clyde."
The story, which is too complicated for its own good, is about the kidnapping of a rich Kansas City socialite (Kim Darby) by a group of 10-thumbed amateurs who are later eliminated by the Grissom family. The family boss is the tough, hard-nosed mother (Irene Dailey), and the family front man is the sleek Tony Musante. But the one they're all afraid of is Slim (Scott Wilson, who played the taller killer in "In Cold Blood"). He's a violence-prone, sexually repressed maniac who loves his mother not wisely and not too well. When the gang holes up with their captive, he falls in love with her.
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