Out In The British Film Noir Night- “Black Orchid”

DVD Review
Black Orchid

Blue Dahlia, Black Dahlia, Black Orchid, hell, even pink roses, they all reek of film noir and all are very, very nasty flowery ways in which murder, murder most foul, can be committed by some ingenious sport looking to commit the perfect crime. But we have worked the film noir milieu, although not the British variant as extensively, long enough to know, know for dead certain, that crime does not pay and so some rough-hewn justice will out in the end. Although the effort here, Black Orchid, is not one of the better British entries in the genre that simple home truth outs in the end.

Here is why. A dedicated English doctor out to cure one of the world’s myriad medical diseases is trapped in a bad marriage with a wife from South Africa who is nothing but a social-climber (not unusual in high society although not always from South Africa) and, frankly, a drag on his career. She will not divorce him however until she is good and ready. Good and ready comes when her younger sister comes from South Africa to help our Good Samaritan doctor out with his research and they fall in love (not unusual either although again not always all the way from South Africa). There she is ready for her own reasons to go through with divorce. That reason happens to be a funny Brit rule that the sister of a divorced woman cannot legally marriage that ex-husband while the ex-wife is still alive (yah, I know but you know how funny those Brits are with their common law this and that). So you know that the ex-wife is a goner, no question.

What is at question though is who killed the darling ex-wife. Naturally the way in which she died (as a result of nicotine-essence poison) points to our good doctor and he takes the fall for a while, mainly as a result of the accusations of some shrewish personal maid of the ex-wife’s who is sure the doctor did the deed. End of story. No way, see the ex-wife was spending her lonely hours with a caddish publisher who also happened to be nutty for odd-ball flower arrangements, black orchids, okay. Once he tired of her he used a little nicotine-essence poison that he used to make his flowers grow better to avoid any scandal that might come his way as a result of that dalliance. Nice, right? Of course no way is he going to get away with that and he doesn’t but you can see where once again, for the umpteenth time, crime doesn’t pay, and also that the plotline, dialogue and repartee here are calculated to make you curse the day you decided to check out toney upper-class 1950s British film noir efforts.