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!"

Clip from "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"  1970

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

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR 1973

From Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943):

Joseph Cotten- "How was church, Charlie? Did you count the house? Turn anybody away?"

Teresa Wright- "No, room enough for everyone."

Cotten- "Well, I'm glad to hear that. The show's been running such a long time I thought maybe attendance might be falling off."

When it comes to movies based on the final days in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Hollywood has been running a near-nonstop show on the subject since 52-year-old H.B. Warner portrayed the screen's first grandfatherly Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 silent classic, King of Kings. Since then, the movie industry has cranked out a new Jesus film every couple of years or so. Sometimes just to make use of new technological advancements (sound, color, Cinemascope), other times, merely to keep in step with the times, theologically speaking.

Thus, with so many iterations of the same tale already committed to celluloid, it's fair to assume that by 1973, when the 1971 Broadway rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar was ultimately adapted for the screen, no one involved harbored any illusions that audiences would be flocking to the film eager to find out how it all comes out.

The major selling point of Jesus Christ Superstar was not the story, per se, but its telling. This was to be the screen's first all-singing, all-dancing Jesus, and its daring, once-controversial, "hook" was to have the Passion Play told (with a decidedly youthful slant) from the perspective of, and in sympathy with, the apostle Judas. In Jesus Christ Superstar Judas sees Jesus not as a God, but merely a mortal man guilty of believing his own publicity. What distinguishes the film version is that it is not as decided on the fact of Jesus' mortality as the stage production, and that uncertainly has been presented in such a manner as to provoke questions more than provide answers.

Ted Neeley as Jesus

Carl Anderson as Judas

Yvonne Elliman as Mary

Barry Dennen as Pontius Pilate

In a significant stylistic departure from the glam-rock roots of the Broadway show, film director Norman Jewison (who so memorably sliced, diced, and bisected theater screens in the stylish crime caper, The Thomas Crown Affair [1968]) went the realist route. Taking a multiethnic cast of young singers, dancers, and actors to Israel and filming on actual locations (some sites breathtakingly dressed by production designer Richard Macdonald with Roman remains and ruins), Jewison lights on a visual concept that, with surprising effectiveness, blends the ancient with the contemporary. It's an aesthetic choice rich with tonal and symbolic anachronisms, perfectly suiting the neoclassical, pop/rock musical score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

Contemporary symbols of military power provoke and bedevil the morally besieged Judas

Armed with machine guns and spears, Roman guards march in tank tops and battle fatigues.

The angel Judas descends from heaven by way of an industrial crane.

America's hippie-inspired Jesus movement of the late 60s (Jesus was, after all, the first long-haired, counter-culture revolutionary) which fueled pop-culture works like Jesus Christ Superstar and its off-Broadway cousin, Godspell (1971), greatly influenced my perception of religion during my teen years.

June 1971

Between the years 1971 and 1974, I attended Saint Mary's College High School in Berkeley, which was then an all-boys Catholic school. These were the years when the Catholic Church was all about making itself relevant and hip to us youngsters (Bay Area residents of a certain age recall the regular 60-second radio broadcasts of Father Harry of "The God Squad"), so the Christian Brothers that taught at the school eschewed dark robes and clerical collars for colorful wide ties and bellbottoms, and assembly sermons were apt to be kicked off with a pop song like The 5th Dimension's "Working on a Groovy Thing" blasted over the P.A. system.
Add to this the fact that virtually every citizen of Berkeley at the time seemed to look exactly like the flower-children cast of Jesus Christ Superstar (Saint Mary's custodian/caretaker was a ringer for Ted Neeley's Jesus Christ, only taller, muscular, and with really tight jeans—can't tell you all the spiritual inner-conflict that little teenage crush inspired) and you get a good idea of why looking at Jesus Christ Superstar today feels for me a bit like watching a home movie.

The troupe arriving by bus to enact the Passion Play in the desert brings to mind all those
Catholic School weekend retreats where we kids were encouraged to "rap" and "tell it like it is"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In spite of my Catholic upbringing, I confess that I find it difficult sometimes to become emotionally moved by religious films. I can enjoy the spectacle, the performances, and the moral of the narrative; but few things are more disconcerting and distancing than having ethics-challenged Hollywood try to convince me of the value of a virtuous life, simply led. Thus, one of the great pleasures of Jesus Christ Superstar is its ability to be enjoyed from either a secular or spiritual perspective. Jewison achieves something rather extraordinary in having devised a timeless, utterly cinematic approach to the material (the past and present keep bleeding into one another) that doesn't merely "open up" the play, but rethinks and re-imagines it in a profoundly fundamental way.

The Last Supper - hippie style

The hippy-dippy / flower child look of the film, which so many revivals of the show are so quick to discard, is ideally suited to the time-mashup approach of Jewison's vision. It strikes me as ingenious that we are invited to make parallels between Jesus and his followers and the youth of the '70s. It's a concept that gives the events a timeless appeal while encouraging us to take subliminal stock of the way the hairstyles and modes of dress of '70s-era hippies and college students harken back to the look of ancient Israel.
In stressing the contemporarily familiar, Jesus Christ Superstar establishes a narrative point of view that asks us to question the difference between the myth and the man. And it does so in a way that manages to be both impassioned and reverent, yet refreshingly free of the kind of fervent self-seriousness that mars many films about religion. The non-traditional score (orchestrated pop/rock) and refreshingly ambiguous nature of its visuals (what time is all of this taking place in?) invite the re-examination of over-familiar events and characters.

PERFORMANCES

In listening to three decades' worth of covers, revivals, and re-recordings, I still find this version of Jesus Christ Superstar to be the best sung of the lot. This has a lot to do with the era in which I grew up and the pop sound I'm accustomed to, but the arrangements, orchestrations, and vocal performances here are just top-notch. This is especially true of the late Carl Anderson, whose powerfully clear and expressive voice can still give me goosebumps. Every singer in this role has had to live up to Anderson's standard, and in my opinion, not a single one comes close. His Judas was more than just a great voice, he was a passionate actor, as well.

Carl Anderson's show-stopping rendition of the propulsive title song is one of cinema's great musical moments. And who can resist the envisioning of an angel's wings as the fringe on a Vegas-era Elvis Presley jumpsuit?

Oh, and as every rule has its exception: when I wrote earlier that I'm not easily moved by religious films, that still stands; with the exception of Ted Neeley's performance of the song "Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)." It's the only part of the film that can consistently bring tears to my eyes. Dramatically shot and emotionally intense, it is a really beautiful bit of filmmaking aided immensely by Neeley's wrenching vocal performance. It's the dramatic centerpiece of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Where Jesus Christ Superstar truly shines is in the stark freshness of its visuals. It's a stunning-looking film from every angle. At turns, whimsical, epic, theatrical, and poetic, it is one of those rare adaptations of a stage success that achieve multiple moments of pure cinema.

When I first saw the film, glitter, disco, and Elton John glitz was all the rage, so I was a bit disappointed that Jesus Christ Superstar didn't look more like the stage production, As the years have gone by, I'm glad the film didn't mire itself in a look that would have given it the feel of a '70s variety show. Sure, the hippie style employed may be labeled "dated," but for me, it's a look evocative of the time which created this show's perspective (the '60s) - and somehow that feels more than perfect...it's ideal.

  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The dancing in Jesus Christ Superstar is phenomenal. And all those thin, lithe, 70s bodies are a welcome change from the earthbound, often clumsy-looking, gym-puffed bodies of so many dancers today.

My absolute favorite number in the film is "Simon Zealotes." It hits me from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum of  Neeley's "Gethsemane" soliloquy. It's joy and energy personified, given vivacious, eye-popping life by some of the most fantastic dancers doing dazzling choreography ever filmed. It has the power to bring me to a state of childlike elation in a single viewing. Even now, all I can think when I look at it is, WOW!!! Now that is what I call dancing! (Watching it makes me feel proud to be a dancer, although, if I were to try any of these moves now, I'd likely break into a million pieces like Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her.)

Jesus Christ Superstar is yet another one of those motion pictures that grows better with age. Its themes nostalgically remind me of my youth, yet its enduring innovativeness as a film makes me appreciate Norman Jewison's commitment to making this particular "long-running show" one that will hold timeless appeal for new generations.

Judas Kiss

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011