Anyone who is a fan of Roger Ebert’s work might scratch their head when they finally come across his screenplay credit for “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
“You mean the Russ Meyer movie? The guy infatuated with enormous breasts? That Russ Meyer?”
Yes, that Russ Meyer. He worked with him on three movies, starting with “Dolls,” and for a while I looked at their low IMDB grades and wondered if this was a part of Ebert’s career he was trying to erase.
But having just finished reading Ebert’s memoir “Life Itself” (a brilliant, moving book by the way), you begin to fully understand why Ebert would come to have such a mutual bond with Russ Meyer and how “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” could really be no different than the absolutely batshit crazy sexploitation film that it is.
That’s because Ebert was the strictly Catholic boy stuck in the Midwest, and to see something like “The Immoral Mr. Teas” in Champaign in 1959 represented an unprecedented level of sinfulness that couldn’t be captured in dirty magazines, nudist camp documentaries (“which centered largely on the difficulties of playing volleyball with the ball constantly shielding the genitals”) or French art films. Ebert called it a “rite of passage” for University of Illinois students. When he became a film critic in 1967, he saw “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and his fascination caught up with his career when he realized they were directed by the same person.
Ebert describes having conversations with Meyer in which they discussed the joys of breasts, of which there are plenty in “Dolls.” This movie then is the summation of their curiosity, a movie about the allures of sex and drugs in Hollywood while neither of them actually had direct experience with such things.
The resulting movie is weird even on ’70s exploitation film standards. The last 20 minutes of “Dolls” goes almost completely off the rails, and an introductory drug trip is the most bizarre of all the bizarre, trippy, gay sex montages you’re likely to see. The film’s high octane editing style combined with jarring smash cuts and canted angles designed to accentuate the rough edged psychedelia of girl group rock is infectious.
If my language sounds too flowery and academic for a movie with as much sex, drugs and tits as this movie has, it’s not. Ebert’s dialogue is strangely sophisticated, and Meyer directs it all with Shakespearean integrity. The film’s cult figure Ronnie Z-Man Barzell (John Lazar) speaks in tongues, the porn star Ashley (Edy Williams) always carries a seductive lilt in her voice, even as she shouts ridiculous lines like “There’s nothing like a ROLLS!” and the film’s star Kelly McNamara (Dolly Read) with her perfect body and ’70s vibe just dribbles with pent up sexual energy.
But before long even this characterization flies out the window. Pregnancies, attempted suicides, affairs and murders all strung together in Meyer’s rapid succession make the story beyond comprehension. It should be expected though, because while watching a Russ Meyer movie, it’s near impossible to predict what you might see from one shot to the next. An opening montage about the allures of Los Angeles approaches brilliance in its speed and insanity. Disconnected flashes of softcore porn and construction imagery are so maddeningly obtuse, yet exciting. It’s a miracle of editing in the sense that all of it so anachronistic.
That’s what I like best about “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” The lascivious, sexually charged movies intended for impressionable young minds today have a dirtbag morality and bland flavor to them that completely differs from whatever kind of movie “Dolls” is. There’s so much bad behavior on display in “Dolls,” but it’s all contained in brief flashes of actual sinfulness. The movie is so sporadic and excitable that when you watch it, it’s as though you’re taking a thousand naughty peeks; you’re always tingling for more.
Today’s movies are either so dirty, they’ve simply desensitized teenagers to the joys of feeling as though you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be, or they’re so generic that you’re simply wading through the entire movie to get to the juicy parts.
Not a minute of “Dolls” feels so simplistic. If it was meant to be a “satire, serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic expose,” as Ebert describes it, it’s absolutely all those things and more.