THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE 1969

“I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all of my students are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The malignant propagandizing of fascism—where the authoritarian poses as the individualist, the lockstep conformist masquerades as the iconoclast, and emotionalism and opinion are favored over facts and information—is vividly dramatized in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel about the influence an eccentric teacher at a conservative all-girls school has on her impressionable students, was turned into a stage play by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (Marnie, Cabaret, Just Tell Me What You Want) in 1966. Set in Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 1930s, Allen’s straightforward, whittled-down play serves as the source of Ronald Neame’s exceptional 1969 film adaptation starring Maggie Smith in her Oscar-winning role.

Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie

Pamela Franklin as Sandy

Robert Stephens as Teddy Lloyd

Celia Johnson as Miss Mackay

Gordon Jackson as Gordon Lowther

Jean Brodie is a dedicated Junior-sector teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls who, while taking pride in cultivating fervent loyalty and compliance from her pupils (those deemed worthy of being among the elite members of her “Brodie set,” anyway), fancies herself a gifted shaper of minds and liberator of spirits. Refusing to allow herself to be labeled or stigmatized by the provincial mores of the day that would brand her a middle-aged spinster, Jean Brodie asserts that she is in her prime (“The moment one is born for”) and committed to having her students reap the benefits of such timely propinquity. 

Maintaining that the school’s orthodox curriculum promotes stagnation and the upholding of the status quo, the flamboyant Miss Brodie eschews traditional teaching methods, instead choosing to devote class time to waxing poetic on the topics of love, heroism, art, etiquette, and her romanticized fondness for the fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

Passionate to a fault, Brodie’s dictatorial side rears its head in her penchant for passing off personal opinions and subjective tastes as unassailable facts; hard and concrete “Brodie Laws” subtly enforced and stringently adhered-to lest one risk falling out of the revered teacher’s much-coveted favor. Dismissive of “team players,” “joiners” and any institution or individual failing to share her world view, Jean Brodie is quick to characterize all who criticize or disagree with her as “the opposition” or “enemy.” This disdain for critique of any sort inspiring Miss Brodie to deputize her pupils and have them act as her protectors and co-conspirators in defying her nemesis, the school’s stern headmistress Miss Mackay.

"Do any of you little girls remember what the followers of Mussolini are called?"
"Fascisti."
"That is correct! F-A-S-C-I-S-T-I."

The narcissistic, leapfrog self-dramatization necessary to lead one to interpret mere professional criticism as personal assault (“I shall remain in this education factory where my duty lies. If they want to get rid of me they will have to assassinate me!”) is precisely the sort grand, larger-than-life attitudinizing that the four girls who make up Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème pupils find so appealing. From her florid gestures and affected speech, to the colorful palette of her wardrobe; Miss Jean Brodie represents romance and daring to the supple young minds of the Brodie girls. The members of the Brodie set: dependable Sandy, beautiful Jenny, histrionic Monica, and hopeless Mary McGregor (every clique needs someone to pick on and and blame).

As is often the case with self-styled iconoclasts, setting oneself apart and drawing attention to oneself eventually become indistinguishable characteristics of the breed, adding perhaps, in the case of Miss Brodie, desirability. Miss Brodie may incur the gossip and resentment of Marcia Blaine’s female staff, but the male staff members are drawn to Miss Brodie like the proverbial moths to flame.
She remains the object of amorous obsession for ex-lover Teddy Lloyd, the school’s very married-with-children art teacher—his being a Catholic the single quality disqualifying him as a suitable lover ("How could a girl with a mind of her own have to do with a man who can't think for himself?" ). Gordon Lowther, the school's vocal coach, is the current lover in her life, but Miss Brodie treats him so much like a work-in-progress sociology assignment, the precocious Brodie girls come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that Miss Brodie (who they know loves artists like Giotto) feels genuine passion for Mr. Lloyd, but because he is married, is merely "working it off" with Mr. Lowther.

The Brodie Set
Pamela Franklin, Diane Grayson, Shirley Steedman, Jane Carr
Even in this shot one can see that Sandy will be the force to reckon with

While keeping her adult relationships at an arms-distance, those most susceptible to the magnetism of Miss Brodie’s bohemian spirit (the most naïve and unquestioning of her charge) are taken into her heart and confidence. So bound are they to her by devotion and admiration, they are blind to her manipulation. Miss Brodie, who looks upon life as a series of heroic experiences, romantic ideals, and lofty principles recklessly applied, is less concerned with the genuine education of the girls (it’s hinted that the Brodie girls, while cultured, come up rather short when it comes to basic academics) than she is committed to teaching them all about life…on her terms.

Setting herself apart and above as the example for the girls to follow, she preaches individualism (if Lewis Carroll’s The Red Queen’s “All ways are my ways” can be thought of as individualism) while stressing that she alone is the source of all truth, honesty, and trust. In the end, as the emergent Spanish Civil War inflames Miss Brodie’s ardency for the fascist Franco (the film takes the girls from 12 to 18-years-old), her impact of her heedless influence takes a dangerous and tragic turn.

In many ways, the charismatic but pernicious Jean Brodie suggests a dark-side variant on that beloved, if overworked, theatrical archetype: the garrulous, irrepressible, meddlesome, manipulative "open a new window" drag queen pied piper exemplified by Mame Dennis, Dolly Levi, and Mama Rose. The latter being plenty dark already.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of those remarkable films I fell in love with the first time I saw it. Which was approximately 15 years ago. I had the opportunity to see it during the time of its initial release, but in a year that saw the release of Sweet Charity, Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and The Sterile Cuckoo, my unfamiliarity with Maggie Smith coupled with the starchiness of that title (I can’t even say The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie without my spine spontaneously stiffening) kept me away. Also, being a rather hard sell, marketing wise, the film had a really lousy and misleading ad campaign. As to why I didn't see it in the intervening years, I confess that I assumed it to be one of those remote, inaccessible, British “prestige” pictures that the Academy loves to award with Oscars, so it wasn’t until I was in my 40s and it was broadcast on cable TV that I settled down to watch it. Immediately I knew I would have adored this film had I seen it as a youngster. Not long thereafter, I made a point of reading both the book and the play, I loved it that much.

Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lloyd
Maggie Smith and Robert Stephen were married at the time. They divorced in 1974

The chief attraction of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is simply the patent magnificence of Maggie Smith, after which comes the film’s sharp and witty screenplay and the top-grade performances delivered by the exceptionally well-cast ensemble. A beguiling balance of character-study, romantic drama, and wistful coming-of-age story, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is also a sobering contemplation on the often disarming face of power.

In profiling an authoritarian figure who presents herself as the instrument of change when in actuality she’s merely a tinpot despot intent on imposing a new dictatorial order (demanding loyalty, repudiating differing points of view, labeling criticism opposition), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is impossible to watch these days without drawing parallels with a certain faux-politician, fame-culture miscreant who-shall-not-be-named. Indeed, the film’s “insidious dangers of fascism” angle has never felt more prescient and relevant.

Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lowther
Gordon Jackson was married to Rona Anderson, the actress who played Miss Brodie's rival,
Miss Lockhart the chemistry teacher

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I suspect that director Ronald Neame’s early career as a cinematographer accounts for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’s lack of staginess. While interiors dominate, the film feels neither unduly static nor needlessly opened-up, the focus remaining on the relationships, conflicts, and interactions of the characters.

The scenes come in four varieties of cyclical vignettes spanning the girls’ introduction to Miss Brodie during the school’s Junior cycle (age 12 to 15) though to their Senior cycle (15 to 18). The vignettes: 1) Miss Brodie teaching, or, more accurately, inculcating. 2) Scenes depicting the Brodie girls, spurred by their teacher’s romantic fictions and dalliances, evincing an accelerated sexual and intellectual precocity. 3) Miss Brodie’s relationships with Mr. Lloyd (arm’s length) and Mr. Lowther (a project undertaken…like starting a garden). 4) Miss Brodie’s run-ins with the formidable Miss Mackay—intensely hostile, tour de force encounters that make Batman vs. Superman look like a game of jacks.

I personally like how subtly the passage of time is conveyed in the film, but critics have cited (and here they do have a point) that while the young girls make credible inroads to visible maturity over the course of the film’s five to six year time span, Maggie Smith looks exactly the same at the end of the film as she does at the beginning.

The entertaining forcefulness of Maggie Smith’s performance posits the flamboyant teacher—who remains front and center of the narrative even when she’s off-screen—as the preferred alternative to the rigidly dour Miss Mackay. (I’m reminded of The Trouble With Angels when Gypsy Rose Lee pops up as a glamorous dance instructor to the delight of the girls dominated by Rosalind Russell’s stern Mother Superior.)

Smith’s Jean Brodie is so attractive and appealing a personality that we scarcely notice—much less mind—when she exhibits troubling traits like romanticizing a dictator or attempting to orchestrate the seduction of one of her students by a man old enough to be her father. At these moments she seems more naïve and foolish than malicious, and we, like her students, side with her and feel she is an inspiring breath of fresh air.

But as the film progresses and we sense a lack of flexibility in Miss Brodie's point of view; a lack of generosity or kindness in her treatment of Sandy or Mary; when her self-centeredness reveals a disregard for the feelings of the men in her life; when it looks as though the influence she wields over the lives of the girls is really a need to control...there arrives the point of conflict. The film grows darker and we’re no longer quite as certain of whose side we’re on. Suddenly, Miss Brodie doesn't appear quite so harmless.

"She always looks so...extreme!"
Miss Brodie is sized up by members of the Marcia Blaine teaching staff

PERFORMANCES

The risk of portraying an individual who hides behind a façade of studied (and appealing) artifice is risky. If the artifice is more compelling than the individual, caricature can eclipse character. I’m not sure how she does it, but Maggie Smith, while indulging in some of the most humorously florid vocal and physical posturings imaginable, manages to paint a vivid and human portrait of a woman of boundless spirit and reckless bravado who lives her life without a single thing of substance to moor it to beyond the worshipful, too-impressionable girls trusted to her charge.

Depicting a woman channeling her prodigious energies in all directions at once, Smith miraculously conveys both the self-deception and desperation behind the ostentation designed to conceal what may be the truth that Miss Brodie works so hard to evade: that she is not, in fact, in her prime at all, and she knows it.

Mary McGregor (center), devoted to Miss Brodie to a fault, is the film's most poignant character

Miss Brodie's ill-informed, naive proselytizing, encouraging the impressionable to adopt beliefs and pursue risky endeavors which yield no consequences or danger to herself, can't help but remind me of  those selfish, privileged, bubble-protected celebrities who have much to say about political risk-taking and protest (Susan Sarandon comes to mind) while personally having absolutely nothing at stake.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Maggie Smith’s show, to be sure, but Celia Johnson is extraordinary (both to watch and listen to; her Scottish accent is pure, lilting music). Imagine, if you will, having to find an actress capable of posing a credible threat to the likes of Maggie Smith. On the strength of her facial expressions alone, Celia Johnson’s prim and provincial Miss Mackay is more than up to the job; her scenes with Smith providing the film with some of its most spirited, volcanic moments.

Miss Brodie: "My credo is 'Lift, enliven, stimulate!'"
Miss Mackay: "No doubt...."

But for my money, it is the assured, natural performance of the highly underrated Pamela Franklin (Our Mother's House, The Innocents) that serves to ground the comic/dramatic crescendos of Mmes Smith & Johnson. In portraying the character of Sandy, whose youthful impertinence is the genuine personification of the kind of  intellectual self-determination Miss Brodie professes to encourage in her girls, Pamela Franklin’s unshowy, utterly convincing transformation from inquisitive teen to disillusioned young woman (she was 18-years-old at the time) is one of the unsung miracles of an already outstanding film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY/REALITY

While satisfying my fondness for Maggie Smith performances and ‘60s movies set in schoolrooms (Up The Down Staircase, To Sir With Love), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is ultimately a subtle and shrewd polemic on the seductive, corrupting nature of power, and the ease with which people can relinquish their freedom when confronted with a forceful personality.

It’s clear to us from the start that Jean Brodie—with her strict guidelines for the proper height to open a window and dismissive attitude towards loyalties shown to anything or anyone but herself—is no champion of independent thought and critical thinking. For all her obvious professional dedication she is more an autocrat than a teacher, her self-serving politics rooted in nothing deeper than a deluded sense of her own importance.

"Benito Mussolini. Il Duce. Italy's leader supreme. A Roman worthy of his heritage.
The greatest Roman of them all."

Touting her own teaching methods as revolutionary while (inaccurately) promoting fascist regimes as drain-the-swamp implementers of a new world utopia; Miss Brodie, like all dictators, merely couches age-old totalitarian philosophies in the rhetoric of liberation.

Back in 1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie spoke to the anti-authoritarianism of the youth movement, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Today…well, I hardly have to say why a film about a fascist sympathizer being given a broad forum to spread misinformation is as relevant now as George Orwell’s 1984.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a film so good that it warrants a revisit on the strength of its performances and entertainment value alone. But taken as a cautionary tale for our times—a reiteration of the duty and necessity of resistance—I’d say that in this instance, a little time spent in the classroom of one Miss Jean Brodie would be time very well spent, indeed.

"I am the potter and you are my pride.
You are shaping up.
Soon you graduate to the senior school and I will no longer teach you
...but you will always be Brodie Girls."

BONUS MATERIAL

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was nominated for only two Oscars: Best Actress and Best Original Song. "Jean" is sung over the film's closing credits by composer Rod McKuen, but singer Oliver (who had a hit that same year with Hair's "Good Morning Starshine") had a #1 hit on the adult contemporary charts with his single version. Rod McKuen's “Jean” was performed by Lou Rawls on the Academy Awards broadcast, and lost to Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

Got Pamela Franklin's autograph in 1981 when she came to Crown Books on Sunset Blvd where I was employed. (she's married to Harvey Jason, hence the last name in parentheses at the end of her signature). In 1998 Franklin and her husband would open up a bookstore of their own on Sunset Blvd - Mystery Pier Books

Al Hirschfeld

Copyright © Ken Anderson

VALENTINO 1977

"But if you've got the story, why do you want the truth?"

Though the question is asked of a newspaper reporter by a character in this, Ken Russell’s 11^th feature film, the above-quoted inquiry could well be one posed to movie audiences by any director daring (foolhardy?) enough to venture into the shark-infested waters of the biographical film.
Biopics and their dubious degrees of accuracy have, in all probability, been the topic of comment and controversy since as far back as Georges Halot's Execution of Joan of Arc (1898). Taken to task for their myth-making, fact-manipulation, and outright fabrication; biographical movies have always walked a tightrope straddling documentary and wholesale fiction. At their best, they humanize and give dimension to otherwise remote historical figures, presenting their subjects' lives and achievements in some kind of social or cultural context. At their worst, they’re misleading works of absolute fiction, pawning off hoary narrative clichés as truth by method of thumbtacking real names onto over-familiar narrative archetypes and hackneyed tropes.

Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino in Ken Russell's artful recreation of the 1921 silent,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Entertainment industry figures, with their brand-name familiarity, built-in glamour, fame-idolatry, success-ethic traditionalism, and potential for soapy melodrama and scandalous sex; have always been popular choices for biopics. This in spite of the fact that they also court the potential for embarrassing impersonations, cheap-looking reenactments, actors looking absolutely nothing like the person they're portraying, and a public over-awareness of personal history that wreaks havoc with any desire to deviate from the facts.
But while an anachronistic, out-of-whole-cloth piece of movie fabrication like 1965's Harlow (which barely seems to take place on this planet, let alone the Hollywood of the 1930's) can be painful to watch, the truth is that a blatant disregard for historical accuracy doesn't automatically doom a biopic any more than just-the-facts-ma'am verisimilitude guarantees its success.

Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron in a prototypically
stylized Ken Russell take on All Nazimova's 1921 silent film Camille

Biographical movies are a sub-genre unto themselves, and as such, unlike documentaries, their very nature presupposes and accommodates the application of a contrived dramatic structure (order, if you will) to otherwise haphazard real-life events. And while in many instances this only serves to make the already tenuous connection between the subjectivity of truth and the relative weightlessness of facts even more tangential; it at least provides filmmakers with the latitude to invest historical "truth" with a little creative ingenuity.

I've always held that the employment of a deliberate artistic sensibility is what accounts for the phenomenon which makes a brilliantly crafted, yet highly fictionalized and historically inaccurate film like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) somehow "feel" more fact-based and realistic than say, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid; an equally fictionalized film based on the lives of historic figures, which (due to its adherence to the conventions of the western "buddy picture") feels positively artificial.

If one of the main differences between a documentary and a biopic is that the documentary strives to take an "as is" approach while the biopic demands a distinct point of view; then I find I’m always willing to surrender a certain (flexible) degree of historical truth when a filmmaker has a creative and artistically valid reason to use the biographical film format to illuminate a broader human truth.

Rudolf Nureyev as Rudolph Valentino

Michelle Phillips as Natasha Rambova 

Leslie Caron as Alla Nazimova

Felicity Kendal as June Mathis

Seymour Cassell as George Ullman

In the interest of truth-in-advertising, the title of this film should really be Ken Russell’s Valentino. Making few allusions to historical accuracy beyond its costuming (the brilliant Shirley Russell) and art direction (Philip Harrison); Valentino bears Ken Russell's pyretic, idiosyncratic stamp on every eye-popping frame. Something which turns out to be a very good thing, indeed, since the script— penned by Russell and Mardik Martin (New York, New York)—so often allows the film's central enigma, Rudolph Valentino himself, to go MIA for long periods of time. Even when he's onscreen.

Silent film legend Rudolph Valentino, dubbed "The Great Lover" by his legions of female fans, seemed a shoo-in subject for the biopic treatment in the nostalgia-besotted '70s. But much in the way Fellini’s Casanova—released in the US about six months prior to Valentino—disappointed and alienated audiences by its almost perverse refusal to satisfy expectations (the public anticipated an extravagantly romantic roundelay about the famed 18^th century womanizer,  but what they got was an intensely anti-erotic meditation on the soul-killing effects of loveless sex); Ken Russell’s neutered, demythologizing approach to the legend of Valentino left audiences bewildered.

Valentino paying tribute to Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun for Nazimova's camera

As envisioned by Russell, Rudolph Valentino (Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, grappling with an Italian accent and surrendering somewhere around Transylvania) is a moral innocent who only dreams of owning an orange grove, victimized by Hollywood's venal greed and the grasping self-interests of the women drawn to him. Indeed, Victim of Romance, the name of the solo album released by Valentino co-star and former The Mamas & The Papas songstress Michelle Phillips a few months before the film's premiere (Tie-in…cha-ching!), would have made for a dandy Valentino subtitle.

When introduced, Rudolph Valentino makes living as a taxi-dancer for lonely society ladies, but lives by his own Old-World code of honor: “They buy my flattery and my time, but my love is not for sale!” He holds women in high regard (he answers a starlet’s penitent confession of sexual promiscuity with, "All women are meant to be loved.”), but his irresistibility to the opposite sex—combined with a tendency to surrender all-too-easily to his own romantic fancies—makes him an easy mark for users and manipulators. Which, in this film, turns out to be everybody...women, most fatefully. 

Leland Palmer as Marjorie Tain, Valentino's ever-inebriated exhibition dance partner

"Well, God help you, junior. If you ever have anything worth taking,
some bright bitch is gonna give you the ride of your life!"

The film depicts Valentino’s rise from tango dancer to matinee idol as a largely passive journey, the dashing and occasionally unintelligible ladies man buffeted along by fate, circumstance, and the dominant whims and ambitions of the women who cross his path. From discovery to stardom, two marriages, studio suspension, a bigamy scandal, artistic pretensions (we never learn if he even thinks of himself as talented), to his death at thirty-one; Valentino is seldom depicted as the catalyst for anything that happens to him.

Even his reputation as The Great Lover is chiefly a PR creation born of the effect his masculine beauty and physical grace has on a newly liberated female population, giddily exercising the prerogative of male objectification. In portraying the silent screen Latin Lover as but a passenger in the vehicle life, Valentino often suggests a Brilliantined Joe Dallesandro prototype: the androgynously beautiful male of enticingly ambiguous sexuality, possessed of just the right amount of charismatic vacuousness upon which one can freely project fantasies of desire.

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Carol Kane as a silent screen siren who gives Valentino a leg-up in the movie business

Meanwhile, Valentino’s own desires are routinely presented as ineffectual, asexual, or latently homosexual. This leaves him only two dominant character traits: 1) His dream to have his own orange grove, and 2) A prickly, “he doth protest too much” sense of outrage whenever aspersions are cast on his masculinity. And indeed, speculation about the true nature of Valentino’s sexual orientation crops up so often in this movie it becomes the film's defining leitmotif.
I personally find it intriguing that Russell chose to depict Valentino as a man as elusive to himself as he is to his fans. A man certain of his sense of honor, but little else. The only problem with limiting so many of Valentino's most dynamic scenes to sequences of inflamed outbursts over having his masculinity impugned is that Valentino (at least as realized in Nureyev's haughty indignation) doesn't come across like an honorable man defending his name so much as an on-the-defensive closet-case (a la, Liberace) always a little too at-the-ready to fight and publicly proclaim his heterosexuality.

Is He or Isn't He?
Valentino teaches Nijinsky (Royal Ballet dancer Anthony Dowell) the tango. Nijinsky would have his own eponymous biographical film three years later

With the women in his life posited as the shapers of Rudolph Valentino’s destiny, Ken Russell is free to abandon the traditional rags-to-riches/disillusion-to-reclamation format of most biopics and instead takes a page from the Citizen Kane handbook: Valentino's life is told in flashback via the unreliable narrators who represent the most important women in his life.
The women: socialite Bianca de Saulles (Emily Bolton); screenwriter June Mathis (Kendal); actress Alla Nazimova (Caron); and designer/Nazimova protégée/ Valentino 2nd wife Natasha Rambova – nee Winifred Shaughnessy– (Phillips).  All have come to pay their final (in some instances, self-serving) respects to Valentino at the New York funeral home where his body lies in ostentatious display.

Each woman, in turn, is grilled by a motley phalanx of cartoonishly boorish “Noo Yawk” reporters straight out of The Front Page; the multi-character narration providing, if not exactly illuminating insight into the deceased, then an enlightening view of the deep chasm that can exist between a man and his public image. It also provides Russell ample opportunity to make several interesting (if relentlessly cynical) points about identity, gender, sex, image, art, commerce, and the fanaticism of fame-culture.

Linda Thorson as restauranter Billie Streeter & Emily Bolton as socialite Bianca de Saulles

Using the funeral home and the attendant public pandemonium surrounding Valentino's death as a framing device between flashbacks, this otherwise refreshing emphasis on the female perspective is dampened by the fact that, when contrasted with Valentino's genteel malleability and honest motives, the broad strokes with which some of these women are painted has them veering toward caricatures, or worse, grotesques.

Once the flashbacks have ended and the film fades out on the solemn image of Valentino's corpse lying on a slab in the morgue, only then does it dawn that Ken Russell has pulled off the audacious feat of making a movie about a world-renowned lover that is, in itself, thoroughly devoid of love or romance. You think back over the film and realize that at no time does Valentino ever realize any of his romantic dreams, or even successfully carry out a seduction. (Even the film's most explicit "love scene" is a masturbatory parody of fan-worship, with a star-struck actress realizing her dream of being alone with The Great Lover, yet only able to work herself into an orgasmic frenzy by ignoring the real, flesh-and-blood article and losing herself in solitary fantasy.)

Emotionally Isolated
Valentino and actress Lorna Sinclair (Penelope Milford) depicted 
as sexual strangers joined in isolated fantasy

If the difference between a documentary and a biographical film is the insertion of a point of view, then in the case of Valentino, Ken Russell's would appear to be using the life story of one of the film industry's earliest superstars to dismantle the myth of fame and celebrity-worship. Also, to maybe ask us to examine what difference exists, if any, between "the story" and the truth, and if in the end it really matters.

The heads of United Artists, MGM, and Paramount discuss 
how best they can profit from Valentino's death 

RECEPTION

Valentino was released amidst much publicity fanfare in October of 1977. Bolstered by a sexy poster which emphasized the erotic potential of the subject matter and the film debut of its lead (Nureyev IS Valentino!), it arrived at the tail-end of a spate of nostalgia-laced movies about the film industry: The Day of the Locust-‘75, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood-’76, The Last Tycoon- ’76, and Nickelodeon- ’76. Unfortunately, it also followed on the heels of several poorly-received nostalgia-laced Hollywood biopics—Gable & Lombard, Goodbye Norma Jean, W.C. Fields & Me - all 1976—a downturn in the trend that suggested perhaps audiences had had their fill of Marcel waves and art deco.

Budgeted at $5 million, Valentino was Russell’s most expensive film to date. And on a personal note, I was over the moon with anticipation. At this point in time, I was already a huge Ken Russell fan, though, discounting his BBC TV documentary on Isadora Duncan that aired on PBS, I had only seen three of his films: The Boy Friend, Tommy, and Lisztomania. Valentino was Russell’s follow-up to 1975s Lisztomania, a boxoffice flop that lost the director a bit of the Hollywood cachet he’d earned following the breakout success of Tommy.

I saw Valentino its opening weekend at the Royal Theater on Polk Street in San Francisco. The 100% male—read: gay—audience made me feel like I was in a porno theater. Advance publicity for Valentino suggested a return to the Ken Russell of Women in Love, Mahler, or Savage Messiah, but the audience I saw it with that day was wired for the camp overkill of Lisztomania. From the moment Nureyev opened his mouth and the film began its drag parade of unsubtle, highly-stylized performances, Valentino became a victim of its excesses.

Rudy, The Pink Powder Puff
Nightclub chorus girls sing a song lamenting the emasculation of the American male

REACTION

I was 19 and in film school when I saw Valentino (translated: very-self serious and pretentious) and I recall sitting in that theater feeling as though everyone around me had been sent some kind of prep notes on the movie that I’d failed to receive. Here I was taking it all in with deadly sober earnestness, while all around me people were cracking up at Nureyev’s uncertain acting, Phillips’ flat line readings, the curiously dubbed-sound of many of the voices, and the whiplash shifts from broad comedy to melodrama. Picking up on every line of bitchy dialogue and every glimmer of homoerotic subtext, the audience wasn't laughing AT Valentino so much as operating from a not wholly unsubstantiated assumption that Russell couldn't possibly be expecting us to take any of this seriously.

I was so thrown by the experience I left the theater not at all impressed with the film and returned the following week to find out if  my reaction had been unduly influenced by the audience (by then word of mouth had begun to spread and I had the place almost to myself).  I could have saved myself the money. I remained steadfast in my initial assessment of the impeccable, often breathtaking period detail and costuming; I appreciated the bitter satire and cynicism, and I honestly loved the larger points the film broached in its brutal evisceration of show business and Hollywood in particular. 

Valentino is blessed with a large and talented cast (Huntz Hall and Felicity Kendal are especially good).
But my favorite performance belongs to Leslie Caron. Playing actress Alla Nazimova
as a woman intoxicated by her own theatricality, Caron fits Russell's style to a T

But I had a better understanding of the source of all that audience derision. The movie just fails to gel as human drama (nor, given the pitch of the performances, opera). But not because of the camp or overkill (although I could have done without that prison scene). Valentino rates as flawed Ken Russell for me because in its 2-hours-plus running time, only two brief scenes—one with Leland Palmer, the other, Carol Kane—ever touched on recognizably human emotions in a way that drew me into the story.

Jennie Linden (Ursula in Russell's Women in Love) contributes a hilarious
cameo as Agnes Ayres, Valentino's desert love-interest in The Sheik

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Watching Valentino for the purpose of this essay was my first time seeing the film in nearly 40 years.
Has the film improved? Well, no. The same weaknesses still prevent it from being one I'd rank among Ken Russell's best.
Has my opinion of Valentino changed? Considerably.
The passing of so many years has made me more aware of how much Valentino is a product of its time. Its cold point of view reflecting the pervasive post-Watergate cynicism and revisionist nostalgia that influenced so many movies of the day (The Day of the Locust, New York New York). Its anti-eroticism, reflective of a late-'70s cultural disenchantment with the idyllic promise of the sexual revolution, falls in line with a spate of films whose themes challenged the notion of consequence-free hedonism (Saturday Night Fever, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and the aforementioned Fellini's Casanova). In 1977, I was far too callow for cynicism, and 19-year-olds, by nature, have only the faintest acquaintance with the meaning of consequences.

Perhaps it's my age or perhaps it's because Hollywood today is fresh out of ideas and only knows how to remake things; but Valentino, though far from perfect, feels like a much smarter film than I once gave it credit for. It's still an emotionally remote experience for me, but it clearly strives to be about much more than just the life of the late Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella (whew!). It's a film with a point of view, it's the result of a consistent creative vision, and...although it only intermittently succeeds in getting them across....it's a movie of ideas. Besides, sub-par Ken Russell is still head and shoulders over the best work of many directors I can think of.

Ken Russell makes an unbilled cameo as Rex Ingram, director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tony-nominated actor Mark Baker plays Andrew, the beleaguered assistant director 

BONUS MATERIAL

Many of Valentino's films -  including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, and Camille, are available to watch on YouTube. 

By all accounts, the making of Valentino was an unpleasant experience for nearly all involved. To read about Nureyev's distrust of Russell, Russell's crumbling marriage, the mutual animosity between Phillips and Nureyev, how Russell came to appear in the film, and the story behind that deleted funeral scene plot twist---I suggest the following books:

Ken Russell's Films by Ken Hanke
Phallic Frenzy- Ken Russell & His Films  by Joseph Lanza


AUTOGRAPH FILES

Have absolutely no recollection of when I got this autograph of Carol Kane in 1978.
Worse, I asked her to sign the inside of a paperback copy of Harold Robbins' The Lonely Lady

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS 1970

"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 it became 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 middle-aged wish fulfillment, the film is a garish, never-a-dull-moment, 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 first-time 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.

Dolly Read as Kelly MacNamara

Marcia McBroom as Petronella Danforth

Cynthia Myers as Casey Anderson

David Gurian as Harris Allsworth

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.

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.

Take 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 Rocke. He never gave of himself

For example: Z-Man's parties were 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 trials 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 ushering in of innovative, artistic films like Bonnie and Clyde, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, felt strongly that the motion picture industry was ill-served by a film like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. A film that 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 near-irresistible 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 conventions 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

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 femdom 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 none-trick-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.

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 a 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

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, lightning-in-a-bottle quality BVD possesses which 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 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, breast-fixated 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 Joyce Rees 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 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. Inclusion!

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 African-Americans: 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 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 old-fashioned, 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!

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 Spector-ish 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 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 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 can recall was the fictional, animated, Josie and Pussycats.

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 ax!" 

"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!"

"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

Listen to it HERE

From Z-Man to King Herod
That's Marcia McBroom behind those Foster Grants in 1973's Jesus Christ Superstar 

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, 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"

EricaGavin.com

Released with much fanfare, the X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls opened in the first-run Pantages Theater on Hollywood Blvd.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Russ Meyer (whose signature here pretty much reads as 'Russ Mey') was feted with a mini film festival in 1979 in one of the smaller theaters on Hollywood Blvd. Meyer was in attendance and they screened Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens. The audience was a curious mix of gay males and sweaty-looking mid-management types who proudly declared themselves "tit men" during the Q & A. I'm not sure there were any women there at all.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015