835-836 Valley of the Dolls & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

[J Adams]

Russ Meyer is one of the most underrated American directors. I wish Criterion would do more of his stuff beyond the obvious BVD. All of his post "just nudie" films deserve better treatment than they have gotten previously.

[swo17]

Take it up with Meyer's estate.

[MichaelB]

Indeed - Arrow has been on this particular case for some time, but they can't move beyond the existing DVDs (sourced from Meyer's ancient analogue video masters, originally created in the 1980s for VHS/Laserdisc release) without access to Meyer's 35mm pre-print materials, and such access simply isn't being granted.

And in such circumstances, there's nothing you can do except wait for the owners of the material to change their minds.

[J Adams]

Thanks.

Anthology did a limited 2-part retro over the past few years, and what they found was mostly rough 35mm prints of maybe half of his films.

I have no illusions about Meyer's overall position in the pantheon, but he was a pioneer of sorts. And the only 35mm prints that make the retro rounds with frequency are Faster PKK, BVD and, rarely, "Vixen". Probably his best films, but it's sad that we are stuck with the flawed DVDs of his other films. RM himself, from what I can tell, didn't seem to be a good caretaker of his legacy. I guess he was entitled to have that view, or perhaps did not understand what he could do to preserve his legacy.

I would argue that Vixen and the other two ""vixen" films, along with "Up!", are deserving of reappraisal.

[R0lf]

Apparently RM Films are taking suggestions for what to release next on blu ray so shoot them an email if you have a preference.

I bought the Faster Pussycat blu ray from Diabolikdvd because international shipping from RM Films is $80! The pq and correct framing are a vast improvement over the DVD.

[swo17]

I thought it was improperly cropped.

[J Adams]

Yeah I don't really trust RM's estate to produce proper blu-rays. Anyway, Many thanks for the info.

[domino harvey]

Watched these both back to back and my results were about what I expected: Valley of the Dolls is flawed but interesting, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is exhaustingly awful and not interesting. Valley only works because everyone involved treats the absurd melodrama and the on-the-cusp of risqué elements seriously, but Beyond is too pleased with its idiocy and false superiority. Patty Duke was an incredible child actress, but one gets the idea that no one ever told her no, and her Valley perf is justly famous for its unearned ambition and misplayed notes of grandeur. It’s a fascinatingly bad performance, the kind only someone with talent could fully commit to so wrongly. Beyond is just stupid, overcut and hyper, too eager to be naughty or silly at the expense of cohesiveness. I didn’t find the film funny in the slightest (when the best comic idea is a last-minute race slowed down for a character in a wheelchair, something’s gone awry at several steps in the filmmaking process). True, there’s really no need for Valley when one has the Best of Everything or Peyton Place or Where the Boys Are, but I can think of even less justification for Beyond, other than wanting to feel superior to a work that was already its own parody.

[Jakamarak]

Thanks so much for your thoughts on these films. I recently purchased and rewatched Valley of the Dolls and very much agree with your assessment, particularly re: Duke's performance. (I have to admit I'm baffled by the praise for Tate's performance in the essay and elsewhere. She's adequate, sure, but, for better and worse, only Lee Grant gets out of this one unscathed.) I've been on the fence about purchasing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which I saw in the 90s when I was housesitting for a man with an amazing home theater and an extensive laser disc collection. I can't remember what I thought of it then which suggests I must not have loved it. After reading your comments, I think I'll skip revisiting that one.

[Gregory]

I've never gone out of my way to see "BVD" just because it seemed like the kind of thing that made sense as a cult favorite if you saw it when it was new, but am I really going to join the cult in 2016? Same reason I never watched Rocky Horror: all these years have gone by and I wasn't any part of the thing, am I going to suddenly "discover" it now? That ship sailed decades ago, for me anyway, but if I do ever get around to BVD the interest would be purely out of the uniqueness of seeing the result of an independent, X-rated filmmaker being given a blank check at a major studio. What makes me stay away even from that is the impression that they were all having so much fun making the film that they didn't plan the story or what kind of film it was going to be on some basic levels, such as smut vs. more mainstream satire, so it ended up as a weak X-rated Meyer film, not different enough from Meyer's usual fare to be able to get an R rating but also not close enough to true X material to have included all the risque content that Meyer would have liked to include.

[zedz]

Watched Valley last night and it's certainly one of the worst films Criterion has ever released, but it does have its own grisly fascination. It's basically an incredibly long PSA, with the same depth of characterisation and narrative nuance, studded with stillborn songs and performances that are at best indifferent and at worst hysterical (though only fitfully amusing in their awfulness). Susan Hayward is the only performer who manages a spark of life, and it's in an awful role.

What's fascinating about it is that this is establishment Hollywood trying to do something with the new adult 'freedoms' of the late '60s, and what they do is tellingly childish and tone-deaf. "Hey! We get to say "faggot" about twenty times! Ain't we sophisticated?" "Oh, so you've got gay characters in your film?" "No, what? Are you crazy?"

Hollywood had been making adult films for years, but at the blunt blockbuster end of the sausage factory, their conception of 'adult' is that of a twelve-year-old. It doesn't even work as camp.

[MichaelB]

I've never gone out of my way to see "BVD" just because it seemed like the kind of thing that made sense as a cult favorite if you saw it when it was new, but am I really going to join the cult in 2016? Same reason I never watched Rocky Horror: all these years have gone by and I wasn't any part of the thing, am I going to suddenly "discover" it now? That ship sailed decades ago, for me anyway, but if I do ever get around to BVD the interest would be purely out of the uniqueness of seeing the result of an independent, X-rated filmmaker being given a blank check at a major studio. What makes me stay away even from that is the impression that they were all having so much fun making the film that they didn't plan the story or what kind of film it was going to be on some basic levels, such as smut vs. more mainstream satire, so it ended up as a weak X-rated Meyer film, not different enough from Meyer's usual fare to be able to get an R rating but also not close enough to true X material to have included all the risque content that Meyer would have liked to include.

You can talk yourself out of watching pretty much anything using similar tactics. But it's clearly nonsense to say that "they didn't plan the story or what kind of film it was going to be on some basic levels" - both Meyer and Roger Ebert have confirmed that the film was rigorously scripted in advance and that they both knew exactly what they were doing, even if Fox didn't have a clue what they were funding - and that all of this is completely obvious from the film itself. This is why they bridled at having Beyond the Valley of the Dolls constantly lumped together (and sometimes double-billed) with Myra Breckinridge, which really was a runaway disaster made by people who didn't know what they were doing.

(Full disclosure: I produced Arrow's release of BVD, and it's one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. Especially when I went through the SDH subtitles changing blah stuff like "Music playing" to "Slow tuba version of 'Deutschland über Alles' playing")

[colinr0380]

Amusingly enough, I seem to remember even when Channel 4 first showed Beyond The Valley of the Dolls on UK television in the late 90s, it was still being paired up with a similar first outing for Myra Breckinridge!

[Gregory]

I've never gone out of my way to see "BVD" just because it seemed like the kind of thing that made sense as a cult favorite if you saw it when it was new, but am I really going to join the cult in 2016? Same reason I never watched Rocky Horror: all these years have gone by and I wasn't any part of the thing, am I going to suddenly "discover" it now? That ship sailed decades ago, for me anyway, but if I do ever get around to BVD the interest would be purely out of the uniqueness of seeing the result of an independent, X-rated filmmaker being given a blank check at a major studio. What makes me stay away even from that is the impression that they were all having so much fun making the film that they didn't plan the story or what kind of film it was going to be on some basic levels, such as smut vs. more mainstream satire, so it ended up as a weak X-rated Meyer film, not different enough from Meyer's usual fare to be able to get an R rating but also not close enough to true X material to have included all the risque content that Meyer would have liked to include.

You can talk yourself out of watching pretty much anything using similar tactics. But it's clearly nonsense to say that "they didn't plan the story or what kind of film it was going to be on some basic levels" - both Meyer and Roger Ebert have confirmed that the film was rigorously scripted in advance and that they both knew exactly what they were doing, even if Fox didn't have a clue what they were funding - and that all of this is completely obvious from the film itself. This is why they bridled at having Beyond the Valley of the Dolls constantly lumped together (and sometimes double-billed) with Myra Breckinridge, which really was a runaway disaster made by people who didn't know what they were doing.

I don't think all that many movies/shows fall into the category I was describing, at least not for myself. I'm not saying I won't sometimes watch such cult favorites even if I'm coming to them extremely late, which I still do, but it's usually from such an extreme distance from their original time and context that it's really nothing like an experience of what made them cult classics in the first place, and I think I have a good sense of what's too far out of its milieu to strike a personal chord with me. All of us, after all, make tentative personal judgments about films we haven't seen insofar as we have to decide which old films to catch up to and which seem like ones we're okay with putting off indefinitely or even planning never to see.

I also don't remotely see how it's "clearly nonsense" to say that Ebert and Meyers didn't plan the story in some key respects, considering that in Ebert's own words, "The movie's story was made up as we went along"! He's talked about how certain parts of the screenplay were written before later developments were formed on the spur of the moment (e.g. about who the Z-Man character really was) and didn't take into account some of those later plot developments to be read clearly as a cohesive whole. Certain things had already taken shape before Ebert and Meyer had an inkling of some of what emerged later on the fly—not only some twists in the writing process that reshaped characters such as Z-Man but also sequences that were improvised during filming.
As for them not really planning "what kind of film it was going to be," as I put it earlier, Ebert suggests that Meyer wanted it to be all kinds of things simultaneously that don't fit together in any conventional sense, including a comedy/satire, a serious melodrama, a skin flick, and a moralistic expose. Those elements can be combined in some way certainly, but does the result succeed in being great at any of those things let alone all of them at once? And if it does succeed, was it really due to careful planning about where it was going to hit its mark?

Michael, I respect your work a lot and am inclined to defer to your much greater knowledge of this film, but it seems like you're being a bit unduly dismissive of what I was saying here, which I didn't just pull out of nowhere but instead grounded in Ebert's accounts that I'd read from different periods, including in Life Itself and his 10-year anniversary piece on the film in Film Comment. The statement that the film was "rigorously scripted in advance and that they both knew exactly what they were doing" is fairly vague and in some ways seems to clash with some of the facts I've noted here, which I didn't mean to offer up as criticisms of the film.