Lost In The Valley
By: Ronald Falzone |
Thursday June 08, 2006 |
| Putting the "C" in camp, Beyond the Valley and Valley of the Dolls get the royal treatment on DVD. |
| "Camp" is one of those descriptive terms which seems to have a pretty fluid definition. For some, it is synonymous with gay humor. For others, something amusingly retro is called camp. For me, anything that falls into the category of "beautiful uglies" deserves the camp label.
A "beautiful ugly" is any movie that is so awful that the pleasure in beholding it is nearly orgiastic. These are comparatively rare but if there was any period that seemed to have a lock on the form it would have to be the late 60's. The self-censoring Production Code died in 1966 so all bets were off in terms of what could or couldn't be shown. At the same time, Hollywood was collapsing of its own weight and thought the best way to regain an audience lost to television was to give them what the tube could not provide. Sex, and lots of it. Such desperation naturally leads to bad decisions and bad decisions lead just as naturally to beautiful uglies. When Grace Metalious published her hugely popular novel "Peyton Place" in 1954 she kicked off an industry that specialized in the tawdry and the titillating. Its story of the conflicting sex lives of two generations in a small New England town created a phenomenon. Everybody wanted to read that book. Knowing a good thing when they saw it, 20th Century-Fox bought the rights and assigned director Mark Robson the seemingly impossible task of adapting it into a movie that wouldn't challenge the censors. Robson proved a good choice for the job. His impersonal style and "good taste" kept the censors at bay while still providing enough hints of infidelity, rape, incest, abortion, teen sex and murder to bring in the audience. Peyton Place (1957) is a good movie and still wildly entertaining in the way an involving melodrama can be. Robson was again the studio's choice ten years later when it picked up an even tawdrier bestseller, this one by Jacqueline Suzanne, the reigning queen of 60's jet set sleaze. But there is a big difference between Metalious' "Peyton Place" and Suzanne's "Valley of the Dolls" The former is about time, place, and characters; the latter is about sex, drugs, (really bad) music and characters whose depth is even shallower than the paper on which they are printed. In short, a film version of "Valley of the Dolls" has all the makings of a perfectly beautiful ugly. And Robson, along with stars Patty Duke, Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Susan Hayward, bring it home. In many ways, Valley of the Dolls (1967) is a perfect fusion piece for 20th Century-Fox. During the 50's, Fox did two bread and butter genres, the melodrama (Long Hot Summer, From the Terrace, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, etc.) and the "three girls set out to trap millionaire husbands" romantic comedy (How to Marry a Millionaire, Three Coins in the Fountain, etc.). Valley of the Dolls combines these two genres and throws in lots of sex for good measure. And drugs. And (really really bad) music. The result of this fusion is one of the truly awful delights of the American cinema. Robson seems at a complete loss as to how to tell a story that simply does not match his pseudo-literary tastes. He indulges his actors' performances and, even worse, their hairstyles so that everyone comes across with all the subtlety of a battering ram. The chief ram in this particular arsenal is Patty Duke. As the promiscuous, drug-fueled "singing" star Neely O'Hara (clearly based on Judy Garland), Duke seems determined to kill and bury that nice young girl who did that TV show about identical cousins. Biting off dialogue the way Henry VIII rips the meat off a chicken leg, Duke rants, raves, falls down, stands up, and conclusively demonstrates why child actors rarely make it as adults. Barbara Parkins as the narrator of this piece is so vacuous that whenever she is onscreen your eye becomes occupied with her hair. Suffice to say that the make-up person applies so much hairspray that Parkins' wig would surely deflect a bullet. As for Sharon Tate, it has become fashionable over the years to mythologize her because of her horrible death at the hands of Charles Manson and his followers. Many lament the loss of a potentially great actress. Apparently they haven't seen Valley of the Dolls. She accepts the news of her breast cancer and of her husband's brain tumor with all the emotional excitement of a carnivore ordering a salad. In such a mess few actors have the chance to shine although God knows Susan Hayward sure tries buffing the leather. As Helen Lawson (cruelly offered originally to Garland), Hayward adds her own patented over-the-top intensity to a movie that was over-the-top before she even showed up. When she slices up Neely with "They drummed you out of Hollywood so you thought you could come crawlin' back to Broadway!,"she almost makes you believe that these entities are enemy camps. Valley of the Dolls was a success in its day and contributed to the coffers of the successful studio that had recently benefited from the windfall of The Sound of Music (1965). Three years later, Fox was in a very different place. After betting the house on a number of flops like Doctor Doolittle, Star, and Hello, Dolly!, the studio was destitute. Desperate to reverse the flow of red ink, studio head Richard Zanuck decided to move forward with a less-than-admirable plan. He would open up the venerable old studio founded by his father to the production of big screen soft-core porn. So certain was he of success that he greenlighted a number of projects that included Myra Breckenridge and Russ Meyer's The Seven Minutes. These would blow up in his face. Alone among the films released by the studio under this new policy, Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) holds a special place in the hearts of many. "Beyond" is most certainly right. In truth, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has next to nothing in common with its namesake. If Valley of the Dolls is an overblown melodrama, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is (you should pardon the expression) straight comedy. As is true with all of Meyer's low-budget "nudie cuties," this film manages to be a goof on the American preoccupation with large breasts while also indulging in same. Working from a script (in)famously penned by Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, Meyer creates a hyperbolic fantasia about success in Hollywood. Here, the compulsory three girls (and a guy) are members of a swingin' 60's rock band. Trust me, Janis Joplin had nothing to worry about from this competition. Hell, this band couldn't even threaten The Archies. Apparently the music they play requires the ingesting of large amounts of cocaine and the regurgitation of even greater amounts of ennui. This is a band that could have used the electrifying presence of Sharon Tate. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls shucks any pretense of plot since this might get in the way of yet another orgy scene or one more bout of back seat sex ("Oh, Bentleys! Give it to me in a Bentley!"). For all of its "hipness" and newfangled sex, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls reveals far more about its makers' fear of the younger generation than I'm sure they knew they were letting out. Here, young people are threats: Sexually, professionally, personally. Like a throwback to DeMille, Meyer lets his characters have all the sex they want then flings retribution at them in the last reel. Meyer was the great critic of America's sexual mores. His critiques, though, apparently required a much smaller budget than the one he has here. Given the run of the studio, his work goes way over the top. This makes for a confusing critique and a hell of a mess. And another beautiful ugly. Like Valley of the Dolls, this film is execrable. I wouldn't miss it for the world. Fox Video has released Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in separate jam-packed double-disk special editions. Both come with plenty of bitchy extras, none of which pretend that the movie being presented is anything less than camp. Of all the various docs and tongue in cheek supplements, the best is Roger Ebert's commentary track on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Honest, funny and at times sardonic, it also acts as an affectionate tribute to Ebert's longtime friend, the late Russ Meyer. It's a deserving tribute. |
