"The film ... is not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls. It does ... deal with the oft-times nightmare world of show business in a different time and place."
Performers: Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John LaZar, Michael Blodgett, David Gurian, Edy Williams, Erica Gavin, Phyllis Davis, Henry Rowland, Harrison Page, Duncan McLeod, Jim Iglehart, Haji, Charles Napier, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock.
Summary: "In 1970, Twentieth Century-Fox, impressed by the visual zing that 'King of the Nudies' Russ Meyer had been bringing to bargain-basement exploitation fare, handed the director a studio budget and the title to one of its biggest hits, Valley of the Dolls. With a satirical screenplay by Roger Ebert, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls follows three young female rockers going Hollywood, in hell-bent Sixties style, under the spell of a flamboyant producer, whose decadent bashes showcase Meyer's trademark libidinal exuberance. Transgressive and outrageous, this big-studio version of a debaucherous midnight movie is an addictively entertaining romp from one of the movies' great outsider artists" - Container.
My first Russ Meyer movie: I remember it well. No, it wasn’t Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but no worries, we’ll get to it. Anyhow, being a fresh-faced first semester freshman at our small-town university back in the day, some friends and I thought it would be fun – and definitely naughty – to go see such forbidden fruit as a nudie movie. The film was Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers [1], apparently not one of Meyer’s more memorable efforts but immensely entertaining, at least I thought so. The film played in a mainstream theater on the main street in town, as did the next film in the Meyer pantheon, the much more famous, and better, Vixen, starring Erica Gavin. Of course I also made it a point to check out Vixen. Aside: at about this time I also took in Gone with the Wind, maybe at the same theater (I hope so; the irony appeals to me). I’d never seen GWTW before and it was currently in the midst of revival screenings. Impressive it was, certainly for its era, but the Meyer flicks made more of an impression. Today, at the risk of being heretical, I’d say Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is straight up a better movie than Gone with the Wind. But I begin to digress. In any event, when I first heard that the title of Meyer’s then-newest, ultimate opus was going to be Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I thought, you gotta’ be kidding me. Curiously, the specifics of my catching Dolls are much less precise in the memory (the release date was July 1970). The venue may have been a drive-in, maybe a theater. The explanation must be that so much had happened in the world and in my own life in the intervening couple of years that it just didn’t register as much. Even the content of the movie didn’t stand out in the memory, and thus I can only recall a few details from that initial viewing: Ronnie Z-Man’s big reveal, the beheading, Edy Williams, that’s about all. I’d even forgotten that it was (sort of) a musical.
Now, a half century later, I just caught Dolls again, and call it nostalgia, sentiment, whatever, I absolutely loved it, so much so that I saw the film two times, four actually if you count the two commentary tracks. What they say about the film is true: it ages like fine wine. In a word, time has been kind to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Perhaps the explanation is its very obviousness and lack of guile. For all the nudity, colorful language, sexual situations, and occasional shocking violence, Dolls has an innocence, warmth and optimism, which, along with its high gloss look, is still appealing and endearing, thus allowing the film to transcend its, frequently sordid, subject matter. Meyer is to be further commended because he, like my own parents, was of the prior, WW2 generation that, to say the least, simply didn’t relate to the Summer of Love, anti-war protests, the drug scene, rock music, and everything else going on in the 1960s, and were more often than not mystified, even revolted, by it. Thus it's to Meyer’s credit, albeit with script writer Ebert’s vital contribution, that he got it right on so many of the cultural references of ca. 1969 [2], even granting it’s all done in the context of satire.
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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls will always, I suppose, polarize fans (and non-fans), a movie that people either love or hate, consider it a kind of masterpiece or a candidate for the worst movies of all time hall of fame. Well, for better or worse, I fall into the love category. I don’t know if I’d anoint it a masterpiece, though it may be Meyer’s masterpiece. But whatever one might think of the film’s desultory, Felliniesque content, from a purely technical point of view it’s absolutely first rate, and it just plain looks great (sounds great, too) in Criterion’s all-the-trimmings 2-DVD release [3]. The film then is sui generis; nothing quite like it has ever been put on the screen, before or since, and it’s been creeping up in critical esteem over the years [4].
More important, the film is an eloquent valedictory coda to all that was right, and wrong, with the Sixties, as well as a meditation on the energetic recklessness of youth and the joy of living in that wild, wonderful, sometimes irresponsible time, gone forever it would seem. But not so fast, my friend: Dolls may be a half century and counting vintage but, in its wacky way, still modern, more than a little wise, and, perhaps most important, it says something to us about, life, love and the human condition that’s both timely and timeless.
style ****
substance ****
[1] There’s one scene in Finders Keepers in which a guy is having a steamy phone conversation with the object of his desire as Chopin wafts in the background. Pretty heady stuff – a touch of class in a skin flick.
[2] As one who lived during the counter-culture era of the late Sixties, in my opinion Dolls is not that exaggerated in the various tableaux and the use of hippy/youth slang. The film actually captures the zeitgeist pretty well, however flawed, or excessive, some of the details. But more important, it got the spirit right.
Aside: I always preferred that actors sing their own songs, and I labored under the illusion that the women in the rock group actually sang their own material. Alas, I later found out to the contrary, though the lip synching is pretty darn good. In any case apparently the women just didn’t have the voices to convincingly put over the tunes.
[4] One measure of Dolls’ growing critical acceptance is that it received two votes in the 2012 BFI/Sight & Sound poll of the greatest movies of all time.* While two votes might qualify as a low-level honorable mention at best, it’s better than no acknowledgement at all. The film is also beginning to show up on directors’ and cineaste’s best films lists.
Aside: it's curious that the fiftieth anniversary of Dolls in 2020 went largely unheralded. Searches online and elsewhere yielded a paucity of results as to think pieces or public events. Part of the explanation of the lack of Golden Anniversary gala events may have been due to bad timing: this was the first year of the Covid virus.
* Sight & Sound/BFI has a relatively simple and equitable method of ranking the films. For the 2022 poll, each critic of the 1,639 total critics polled was asked to submit his/her own top ten choices. Each film that gets a vote gets a point, the points are tallied at the end and the films ranked by the number of points.
By the way in case one wonders why I reference 2012 in fn4 above and not 2022, the explanation is that, as of the writing of this post, I’ve been unable to locate a comprehensive list of films that received at least one vote in the 2022 poll.
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