BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS 1970 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2015/12/beyond-valley-of-dolls-1970.html
"Not a sequel, but like Valley of the Dolls, deals with the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business!" Ad copy for the poster One of the advantages of being old enough to remember a cult film before itbecame a cult film is that it gives you a sense of perspective. Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (also referred to hereafter as BVD) is one of the most deliriously campy, quotable, contagiously musical, visually kinetic, laugh-out-loud bad/good films EVER. A top-ranking favorite of mine, BVD is a non-sexy sex comedy that’s also a surprisingly ingenious send-up of every show business cliché mined by movies since the days of What Price Hollywood? (1932). Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a caffeinated homage to glossy Hollywood soap operas like The Oscar, The Best of Everything and, of course, BVDs rootstock and inspiration: Jacqueline Susann’s immortal Valley of the Dolls (hereafter also referred to as VOD). Although released in the summer of 1970, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a '60s movie down to its bellbottoms and sandals. Depicting a burlesque vision of the Swinging Sixties as it existed only between the tragically unhip pages of "gentleman's magazines" like Playboy; BVD is both groovy and square. A cross between a hyperactive geek fantasy (via 27-year-old screenwriter Roger Ebert) and siddle-aged wish fulfillment, the film is a garish, never-a-dullmoment, laugh-out-loud paean to '60s pop culture excess. Directed with a manic combination of aplomb and amateurism by budget skin-flick impresario Russ Meyer collaborating with firsttime screenwriter, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert; BVD is a film so exhaustively steadfast in its desire to affront and entertain, at times it feels like a Tex Avery cartoon come to life.
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Dolly Read as Kelly MacNamara
Marcia McBroom as Petronella Danforth
Cynthia Myers as Casey Anderson
David Gurian as Harris Allsworth
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Having now fully established the extent to which I lovingly clutch this carnival-colored trash classic to my negligible-by-Russ-Meyer-standards bosom, I can elaborate on what I mean when I say that having an actual recollection of 1970 and the atmosphere in which BVD was released, allows for a sense of perspective. When a once-dismissed film is rediscovered by a new generation of fans, it's not uncommon for history to be rewritten a bit as a means of staking an up-to-date-claim on an older work. In the years it took for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to morph from film reviled to film reveled, a somewhat rarified legend has developed among BVD cultists. One which contends 1970 film critics raked BVD over the coals because they didn't understand that Meyer's film was a satirical comedy (i.e., intentionally terrible), and therefore never meant to be taken seriously. Well, that's not entirely true.
John Lazar as Ronnie 'Z-Man' Barzell. He forgot that life has many levels
Granted, a few critics may have been confounded and didn't know what to make of a film that careened at breakneck speed from musical to melodrama to comedy to ultraviolence; but Russ Meyer's oeuvre of the outrageous was a fairly well-known commodity by the time he'd landed his contract with Fox. Having leapt from peep-show Orson Welles to being the darling of the college film circuit, Meyer's reputation as a sex parodist was well known to any '60s film critic worth their salt. Everyone knew that Russ Meyer had never made a conventional or serious movie in his life. If anyone was apt to misinterpret the built-in sex mockery of Meyer's films, it was likely the grindhouse trenchcoat set—individuals who, by nature, were inclined to approach their softcore T & A with the utmost solemnity.
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Edy Williams as the infamous Ashley St. Ives. Men were toys for her amusement
From what I recall of reviews at the time, the critics who failed to respond favorably to Meyer’s first studio outing didn't do so out of an inability to grasp the film's sophomoric satire; rather, they disliked it because they failed to find cultural value in a bad movie being used to parody a bad movie. Tale also into account that a great deal of what is so camp and amusing about BVD hadn't yet the distance of nostalgia quaintness to make it appealing. Today we laugh at everything from its hippie-dippie rock music, to the extreme fashions, oversized hairstyles, carnival-colored decor, and hooty slang idioms. Although granted the amplified exaggeration of exploitation, the look and feel of this movie was not as absurd then as it looks now. Much like we're all going to look back at the styles and fads of today and laugh at how terrible we all look (Skinny jeans! Full beards? Tattoos and piercings!) but the elderly today find them to be as ridiculous as they are.
Michael Blodgett as Lance Rock. He never gave of himself
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For example: Z-Man's parties were only only raunchier reenactments of those "penthouse party" sequences that kicked off every episode of TVs Laugh-In since it debuted in 1967. Edy Williams' enormous mane of hair and ever-present bikini was basically Raquel Welch's standard photo-op uniform at this time in her career. And comparable variations on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' outrageous crayon palette decor and outre fashions could be found in a plethora of way-out Mod Cinema releases (like Britain's Smashing Time -1967), Italian giallo thrillers (The Sweet Body of Deborah - 1968) as well as so-called "serious" films like Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine (1971).
Phyllis Davis as Susan Lake Excessive goodness can often blind us to the human failings of those less perfect
A lot of '70s film critics were predisposed to dislike Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on principle, finding abhorrent the very idea that the same studio that gave the world The Sound of Music had enlisted the services of a "nudie" director to make an X-rated exploitation film. And as the film's X-rating had as much to do with its violent finale as for its sexual content (it was a rather soft X, but graphic violence was still relatively new to films at the time), cries of "poor taste!" met BVD's bloody 3rd act massacre which was inspired by the less-than-one-year-old tragedy of Sharon Tate's murder. (To make matters more distasteful, the Manson Family murder trails began just two days before Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' July 17 release.)
Erica Gavin as the languid Roxanne
Meanwhile, serious cineaste factions, encouraged by the emergent New Hollywood and the 5/20
ushering in of innovative, artistic films like Bonnie & Clyde, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, felt strongly that the motion picture industry was illserved by a film like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. A film which many felt, like the wholesale auctioning off of studio backlot land taking place at the time, symbolized Hollywood's desperation, decline, and imminent demise. Ironically, these very sentiments proved nearirresistible when it came to marketing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to the college/youth demographic.
Harrison Page as Emerson Thorne Behind that friendly mask lies fermenting the unholy seed of a lawyer
The '60s were the age of the "put-on" and the "put-down." Movies that challenged tradition and poked fun at middle-class convention were popular with the youth market, and the swiftest way for a mainstream film to appear "hip." Young people flocked to the underground films of Andy Warhol (Flesh - 1968, Lonesome Cowboys - 1968), the gonzo cinema of John Waters (Mondo Trasho – 1968), and Russ Meyer’s own string of grindhouse “nudies” (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – 1965, Vixen 1968). When cinema scholars and film critics began to pay attention to these films, cash-strapped Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon with mainstream attempts to capture the campy, comic book zeitgeist with films like Casino Royale (1966), Barbarella (1968), and the popular Batman TV show (1966-1968). The derisive send-up of pop culture grew to be such a popular mainstay, by 1970 America had fairly overdosed on irony and satire.
Duncan McLeod as Porter Hall Used his profession to mask selfish interests...to betray the trust that should have been sacred
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Released during the waning days of the public's brief infatuation with Psychedelic Cinema (druggy, youth-oriented films invariably made by middle-aged men), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and its sister-in-sleaze, Myra Breckinridge (twin Fox releases opening within a week of one another) were last-ditch efforts to hitch a ride on the already steamrolling Youth Culture gravy train. Both films arrived at the tail-end of a veritable onslaught of look-alike outrageous psychedelic send-ups of the Flower Power generation. Oddities like Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968), The Big Cube (1969), Head (1968), Angel, Angel Down We Go (1969), The Gay Deceivers (1969), and a recent personal favorite, An American Hippie in Israel (1970).
James Iglehart as Randy Black Randy's body: A cage for an animal
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—serving up old-fashioned bare bosoms counter to Myra Breckinridge's fenmdom anal rape—was the hands-down bigger hit of the two (it was also the better film); duplicating Valley of the Dolls' fate by being wildly popular with the public, yet widely panned by the critics, and regarded with disdain by the very studio that bankrolled it. The success of BVD should have put Russ Meyer on the road to mainstream legitimacy, but the following year he tried his hand at his first straight dramatic film with the courtroom drama, The Seven Minutes (1971). The results proved that Meyer was something of a nonetrick-pony, and that without his trademark bare breasts and ultra-violence, he was a mediocre filmmaker at best. The financial failure of The Seven Minutes (Meyer's only flop) soured Fox's relationship with the director and happily laid to rest all those film class debates regarding the so-called "intentional" ineptitude of his films ("He knows what he's doing, he's sending up the genre!") and his clumsy way with actors and dialogue.
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Henry Rowland as Otto. The man with the benign, Germanic countenance
Signed to a 3-picture deal by Fox, Russ Meyer, in spite of the failure of The Seven Minutes, might have been allowed to see out his contract had it not been for the matter of his employers, Richard Zanuck & David Brown, being ousted not long after the release of BVD. Finding himself suddenly and once again a free agent, Meyer more or less returned to being “King of the Nudies,�independently (re)making his trademark live-action breast fetish cartoons with little variance until his death in 2004.
Valley Girls Jacqueline Susann is credited with coming up with the title Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for the two (rejected) screenplays she submitted to Fox as bid for a legitimate sequel to her hit, Valley of the Dolls. When a disgruntled Susann sold the rights to her next book, The Love Machine to another studio, Fox (forbidden to make a sequel without her permission) kept her title and made a satire instead. Lawsuits followed
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I felt compelled to contextualize Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—a miraculous mess of a movie I’ve loved since the days it was primarily known as "20th Century Fox’s embarrassment"—because the revisionist narrative ascribing canny premeditation to everything risible and inept in BVD is just too pat. The whole "They knew what they were doing" scenario doesn't pay respect to the freakish, one-of-a-kind, lightening-in-a-bottle quality BVD possesses that makes watching it for the 50th time as much of a blast as the first. No one could have foreseen that a breast-fixated, Johnny one-note director; a newbie screenwriter; and a cast of Playboy pin-ups and hysterically disparate actors would produce a film so dementedly sublime.
The Carrie Nations Beyond the Valley of the Dolls chronicles the exploits of an all-girl rock band coping with the toxic show business cocktail of quick success, easy sex, & plentiful drugs
The making of a completely satisfying, entertaining film is a major feat in itself, and Russ Meyer achieved this miracle twice (BVD and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), and in having the ratio of intentionally awful to inadvertently awful so well-balanced and impossible to discern, these films achieve a kind of ideal perfection. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is my idea of perfect trash art. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Being that I can't think of a single thing I DON'T love about this movie, here is my Top Ten List of favorite things in BVD: 1.Nobody blinks!
On the DVD commentary, we learn that Russ Meyer's rapid-fire editing style is at least in part 9/20
the result of his determined resolve not to show his actors blinking (he believes it breaks audience concentration). Consequently, the actors all look to be in a constant state of astonishment. 2. Boobies, boobies, boobies!
Russ Meyer's concept of the feminine ideal is mired inextricably in the full-figured, breastfixated 1950s. The lean and lanky hippie silhouette typified by Peggy Lipton on The Mod Squad is nowhere to be found in Meyer's Playboy Pictorial vision of an abundantly well-fed and curvaceous 1970. "The-head-is-missing!" Dept: that's headless actress Veronica Ericson embraced by the equally decapitated Michael Blodgett. 3. The fashions!
The 1970s Peacock Revolution in men's fashion made it not only possible but acceptable for young men in their 20s to look like Norman Bates' mother. 4. The hair!
I guess those ginormous breasts have to be offset by something, so towering manes of real 10/20
and synthetic Bobbie Gentry-sized hairdos abound in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. 5. The cartoonish camera angles and sound effects!
Whether it be the sound of a dive-bomber accompanying a suicidal leap, the 20th Century Fox theme played over a beheading, or "Stranger in Paradise" heard during a male-on-male groping session; the sound effects, music cues, and wacky camera angles in BVD confirms Russ Meyer's claim that his films are basically "Superbly made cartoons." 6. Diversity!
Compared to what's going on in mainstream films today (I still can't get over that all-white Into the Woods), the high volume of black actors and PoC used in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is positively radical. Not only are the two most genuinely beautiful actresses in the film AfricanAmericans: the striking Lavelle Roby (above) and Marcia McBroom, but the depiction of the intimate relationship between Petronella and Emerson is actually very progressive for its time. 7. That unexpectedly sweet lesbian relationship!
Gavin & Myers give two of the better performances and display the most chemistry of any 11/20
couple in the film. That their scenes have a touching sweetness thoroughly absent elsewhere in the film is, by all accounts, attributable to Meyer staying out of their way. 8. The movie franchise missed opportunity!
I can never look at Russ Meyer stalwart, Charles Napier (as Baxter Wolfe), without thinking he would have made a wonderful Clutch Cargo in a series of live action features based on the 1959 cartoon TV series 9. The montages!
BVD is full of montages. Breakneck fast montages, slow-mo montages, and charmingly oldfashioned, up-the-ladder-of-success montages. This screencap from the Hollywood montage is of the very first place I lived when I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 (the brick building to the left is the Villa Elaine Apartments on Vine), and the Adm & Eve adult book store next door, the site of my very first LA job! (Stephen Sondheim collaborator George Furth came in once and I got his autograph. As he signed he said, "This is equal parts flattering and demoralizing!") 10. That leopard-print bikini!
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I don't think I need to say anything more. PERFORMANCES By any rational assessment, the performances in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls are not much worse than those found in (limiting the degree of awful to the Jacqueline Susann family) in Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, or Once is Not Enough. The major difference being a matter of aptitude (can’t act vs. won’t act) and energy (there’s not a single lazy performance in BVD. Indeed, Meyer’s idea of pacing seems to be pitched somewhere at “fire drill”). And in that vein, Dolly Read, David Gurian, Phyllis Davis, and Duncan McLeod are all pitch-perfect.
"What I see is beyond your dreaming." Faster Pussycat star, Haji, whispers mystically in Z-Man's ear
Spouting an endless stream of ersatz-Shakespearean double talk, John Lazar as Phil Spectorish music tycoon Z-Man Barzell (who looks uncannily like the former husbands of both Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli) gives an unforgettable, appropriately bizarre, Frank N. Furter prototype performance.
Edy Williams (acting with her teeth) makes Ann-Margret's thesping in Kitten With a Whip look 13/20
nuanced. Although a campy, fun presence onscreen, Williams was apparently not very popular with many on the set, save for Russ Meyer, whom she later wed. And even he, according to Erica Gavin, "Couldn't stand her." I harbored a crush on reptile-eyed Michael Blodgett for a long while, inducing me to subject myself to 1971s The Velvet Vampire (available on YouTube) because he has a few nude scenes in it. THE STUFF OF FANTASY As a fan of all manner of '60s pop music, I love the soundtrack to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. As a fan of women’s prison films (Roger Corman's Swamp Women), girls reform school movies (Girls Town), and Andy Warhol’s BAD - a movie about an all-girl hit squad; there’s something irresistibly badass about the idea of an all-girl rock group.
"In the Long Run" & "Find It" are two songs on heavy rotation on my ipod
I was 12-years-old when Beyond the Valley of the Dolls came out, and I remember at that time television programming was chock full of rock groups. Real-life bands like The Beatles, The Jackson Five, and The Osmonds all had their own animated TV shows, and in addition, there was The Archies, The Groovie Goolies and The Cattanooga Cats. Live action had The Bugaloos, The Partridge Family and reruns of The Monkees. The only women's rock group that I van recall was the fictional, animated, Josie and Pussycats.
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The big singing voice we hear coming out of Dolly Read's mouth belongs to Lynn Carey (shown above, right, giving grief to Tuesday Weld about her lack of cashmere sweaters in Lord Love a Duck). Carey also co-wrote two of the songs with composer Stu Phillips.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS No tribute to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls would be complete without a list of my favorite lines of dialogue: "I’ve already seen a display of your discretion. It’s reminiscent of a meat axe!" "In a scene like this you get a contact high!" "Who is it Emerson. The delivery...boy?" "Have you ever been whipped by a willow until the blood came?" "You’re a groovy boy. I'd like to strap you on sometime." "And there's someone else inside, but I - I don't know who it is...THE HEAD IS MISSING!"
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"But you said you were going to study!" "Yes, I vow it; Ere this night does wane, you will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!" "The cat swore up and down it was Acapulco Gold, so if we’re lucky, maybe it’s at least pot!" "And how's she getting home?" "Roxanne, will you watch out for me?" (not funny, just the sweetest line in the movie) "Don’t Bogart the joint!"
BONUS MATERIAL
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Listen to it HERE
From Z-Man to King Herod That's Marcia McBroom behind those Foster Grants in 1973's Jesus Christ Superstar
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In 1967 Michael Blodgett was the host of "Groovy" an LA-based teen music show shot on location on Santa Monica beach
The fey art director Haji locks in a cage in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is Sebastian Brook, 18/20
who portrayed by the mysterious Argyron Stavropoulos in Rosemary's Baby.
Although never seen onscreen, Pam Grier was cast as an extra in BVD. Marcia McBroom says she and Grier were roommates at the time, and both auditioned for the role of Petronella Danforth
The extras on the BVD DVD features production stills showing Dolly Read in old-age makeup. They accompany youthful photos of her in a mod Union Jack outfit in a stylized church setting. A deleted musical or dream sequence, perhaps?
Bad Idea Dept: Slated for 2016, Will Ferrell & Josh Gad are set to star as Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert in a film about the making of BVD titled: "Russ & Roger Go Beyond" Released with much fanfare, the X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls opened in the first-run Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd. Copyright Š Ken Anderson
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EricaGavin.com
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