high gloss trash, and a second ten

     Myra Breckinridge. Beverly Hills, California: Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, [2018]. DVD. Screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler; produced by Robert Fryer; director of photography, Richard Moore; film editor, Danford B. Greene; music, Lionel Newman. Directed by Michael Sarne; produced and released by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1970. Based on the novel by Gore Vidal.
    Summary: after going to Europe to have a sex change operation, Myron Breckinridge is transformed into Myra, who claims to be Myron's widow. Performers: Raquel Welch, Mae West, John Huston, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett, Roger Herren, Calvin Lockhart, Jim Backus, John Carradine, William Hopper.

    I’m usually all in for bad movie classics, just out of pure curiosity. Besides, guilty pleasures or no, bad movies can be immensely entertaining. Moreover, they (usually inadvertently) provide a window into social and and cultural attitudes of the day. Anyhow it was a little out of character that I waited so long to catch Myra Breckinridge. But since there’s a DVD copy at my local library I decided, what the heck, I’ll give it a whirl and see what happens. I was happily surprised. Contrary to its reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, Myra Breckinridge is actually pretty good, in a Valley of the Dolls sort of way [1]. Say what you will about Myra Breckinridge, it’s seldom dull, and from a purely technical standpoint, rather skillfully put together. Approached in a certain frame of mind, MB can be great fun. And maybe there’s a certain ironic justice at work in that, for all its supposedly chaotic production disasters and the subsequent critical savaging it received, the creators of Myra may well have gotten in the last word after all. Today it’s considered a bona fide cult classic and has a devoted, if small, following, and as a result its reputation steadily increases with the passage of time.

    The film’s legendary haphazard production history actually gives us some, perhaps unintended, aesthetic benefits as the bumpy narrative plays with our expectations, then frustrates them. To wit, as Myra in most leisurely fashion gives our stud Rusty his physical exam, we suspect it will culminate in a more or less conventional sexual encounter, and thus her wild ride-the-bronc scene is all the more effective because it’s so unexpected (and, it must be admitted, shockingly over-the-top in its bad taste). Another element of unexpectedness is that the scene also reverses (is that the word?) the usual woman-on-top configuration. Other felicitous results are the Golden Age film clips interspersed, albeit somewhat jarringly, throughout. There’s also the Myra/Mary Ann quasi-lesbian encounter, which teases us with affectionate moments, but never goes all the way to the Sapphic heart of the matter (it seems that Mary Ann was just too reluctant, probably because she was straight). For all that the scene is sensitively and beautifully done, it’s a pale shadow of the Cynthia Myers/Erica Gavin steamy encounters in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which are far superior in their titillating depiction and resultant emotional impact.

"OK, boys. Get your resumes out"

   Which brings us to the movie I always associate with MB, and that’s the aforementioned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [2], henceforth simply referred to as Dolls. Both were released in the same year, by the same studio. Both employ the same garish color palette, and both go gangbusters in satirizing the film industry, California counterculture, gender roles, superficiality of American materialism, and anything else they could think of. And both reap the benefits of, shall we say, hindsight. Yes, time has been kind to Myra and Dolls, especially Dolls. Even with its greater nudity and more overt sexual situations, Dolls has a warmth, optimism and innocence not present in MB, which has a harsher, more cynical tone. Moreover, Dolls is straight up the far more polished product, in a word, just a better film, even if it lacks Mae West [3].

    Speaking of Mae West, I’ve never been much of a fan. To me there was always a one-note quality to her saucy persona. But here, as the man-eating agent Leticia Van Allen, she’s just right. She seems to be having a great time essaying what’s basically a parody of herself. What’s more she just looks great: actually I think she’s sexier in MB than in her glory days in the early Thirties.

    One unexpected pleasure was a cameo by the usually virtuous William Hopper of Perry Mason fame. In MB he’s cast against type as a far right (and eminently hypocritical, corrupted and corruptible) judge. Quite the send-up of the ultra-conservative political views of his mother, the infamous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Whatever the context, the joy of seeing Hopper is tinged with a certain sadness as he died in 1970 at the age of fifty-four, just a few months before MB’s release. It was his last film and as such a somewhat inglorious end to a solid if under-appreciated career.

    The real revelation of Myra Breckinridge is Raquel Welch. In the title role she delivers the performance of a career, and we get a glimpse of just how good an actress she was. It serves as a bittersweet reminder of the career that might have been had she been taken seriously as an actress and not always typecast as a sex bomb [4].

    As for my somewhat superfluous ‘best movies of all time’ second ten, what can be said? I seem to be on a best/most kick these days, and I thought another list wouldn’t hurt. It might have been out of a sense of frustration that, in compiling my original top ten, indeed I had to limit the list to ten titles. Ergo a second ten. Actually numbers eleven to twenty might be a more accurate description. Readers will note that I’ve fudged a bit and included ties this time around. So be it. Anyhow drumroll please, here they are, more or less in chronological order:

tie: Metropolis, M
Olympia
The Seventh Victim
Les Enfants du Paradis
Meshes of the Afternoon
The Red Shoes
tie: The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura
The Naked Kiss
tie: Death in Venice, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Blade Runner


[1] The original Valley of the Dolls, that is, not the ‘Beyond’ version. More on that film in the post above. By the way both Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley are discussed elsewhere in these pages.
[2] Indeed it seems I’m not alone in conflating the two camp/trash classics, as over the years it’s not been uncommon for theaters to screen Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a double feature.
 [3] Part of the explanation may be that Dolls was helmed by Russ Meyer, who was probably just a better director than Michael Sarne. Another possibility is that Meyer may have been given a freer hand by the studio.
[4] In a case of MB paralleling Dolls again, Hollywood also missed the boat on Cynthia Myers, not as good an actress as Raquel Welch by a long shot but her equal in sex appeal and screen charisma. Another instance of a career that might have been.

"this is my happening ..." : Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

     Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Motion picture); a Russ Meyer production; screenplay by Roger Ebert; story by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer; produced and directed by Russ Meyer; music, Stu Phillips; director of photography, Fred J. Koenekamp; art directors, Jack Martin Smith, Arthur Lonergan; editors, Dann Cahn, Dick Wormell. Produced and released by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. Two-DVD special edition; widescreen. New York, N.Y.: The Criterion Collection, 2016. Originally released as a motion picture in 1970.

    "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: With a studio budget at his command and a satirical screenplay by Roger Ebert, nudie cutie director Russ Meyer told the story of three young starlets seeking glory in a Bacchanalian Hollywood, all rendered in quintessentially flamboyant Sixties style with the director's usual libidinal excess and irreverence. 

 
    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 then 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, Michael Blodgett's leopard spotted trunks, 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.

       As for Dolls itself, the principals give it their all, and they actually add, shall we say, authenticity to the mix in that most aren’t professional actors, but nonetheless do quite well in their roles. Their exuberance, and a lot of the innocence, carries over onto the DVD commentary by five of the actors (Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Harrison Page, John LaZar, and Erica Gavin), who are having a great time reminiscing and adding their own little touches of history and trivia. By the way Roger Ebert’s more cerebral commentary track is equally engaging, providing much film industry detail and lots on director Meyer.

    Two minor criticisms of Dolls: there may be one song sequence too many, and the final pious epilogue seems out of place in such a seat-of-the-pants, wild ride production. But why bother with such (relative) trifles amongst the manifest mountain of riches.

    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 (or may not) be Meyer’s masterpiece. Many would go with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and I tend to agree. At minimum, Dolls is certainly Meyer's most polished, highest gloss production, not so coincidentally done with all the resources of a big studio behind him.  

     And whatever one might think of the film’s desultory, Felliniesque content, from a purely technical standpoint 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. Even today, a half century and change later, as one of seventy something years, I nonetheless sense a sliver of the spirit of Dolls that remains in the nether regions of the psyche. In our very different world today, Dolls's message of compassion, tolerance, freedom, social justice, inclusion, pacifism, and respect for the environment - and each other - still resonates. In its outrageously wacky way, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is 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 anything goes era of the late Sixties, in my opinion Dolls is not that exaggerated in the various tableaux depicted and the use of hippy/youth slang. To wit: your humble writerly servant indeed attended some of the - wild or otherwise - counter-culture parties and 'happenings' of the era (some even freaked me out). More to the point, the film actually captures the zeitgeist pretty well, however flawed, or excessive, some of the details might be. In a word, it got the spirit right.

   [3] The Criterion version includes a bevy of special features, including the above-mentioned commentary tracks; the making-of short, "Above, Beneath and Beyond the Valley: The Making of a Musical-Horror-Sex-Comedy;" episode from 1988 of The 'Incredibly Strange Film Show' on director Russ Meyer, and others. But my favorites are the extended interview with John Waters in which he talks about his association with Meyer and offers a brief overview of Meyer's career; and the very sweet "Casey & Roxanne: The Love Scene", in which Cynthia Myers and Erica Gavin look back three and a half decades later at their lesbian scenes in the film.
     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 movies of all time 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, at least in theory, 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.
     [Update, 13 May 2024: While it took some digging, I was able to verify that in the 2022 poll Dolls received four votes, again a low level honorable mention of the four thousand-odd titles that received at least one vote. It should be mentioned that the information I found combined both the critics' and directors' polls, thus if we fudge the numbers four votes might be considered roughly analogous to the two votes it received last time around (2012). Also of interest is that two other Meyer productions, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens (1 vote) and the above-mentioned Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (4 votes) were listed in the 2022 poll, all of which is signaling a measure of respectability for Meyer as a director of substance.]