Showing posts with label Michael Blodgett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Blodgett. Show all posts

Monday, October 8, 2018

THE VELVET VAMPIRE 1971

“Susan, have you ever noticed how men envy us?”
“Envy us, how?”
“The pleasure we have that only we can have. We can’t help it. It’s just our nature, the way we are. And in their secret hearts, they hate us for it because they can never know what it’s like.”


I was never much into vampire movies growing up. That I’ve managed to see so many of them…Dracula, his brides, sons, and daughters included…is due to my older sister; a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan who used her size and age advantage to make sure that every Saturday night the family TV was tuned to Channel 2’s Creature Features, a double-barreled parade of classic and (mostly) not-so-classic horror and sci-fi flicks hosted by the bespectacled Bob Wilkins. Since it was either vampires or go to bed early on one of the few nights I was allowed to stay up, the Gothic bloodsuckers invariably won out.

My feelings about vampire movies weren’t rooted in anything specific, merely that they failed to capture my imagination because I never found them to be very scary. Monsters being more to my taste back then, to my way of thinking vampire movies were essentially just Gothic romances where the “necking” was taken to its literal extreme. (I do recall having had this weird, neat-freak reaction to the way vampires in movies always allowed the blood to run down their faces after feeding. Here they were, these genteel, over-refined Counts turned out in fastidious Victorian finery, yet dribbling blood down the sides of their mouths like babies without bibs. What were all those lace handkerchiefs for? Weren’t there any anal-retentive, OCD vampires?)
But whatever the reason, it was clear my personal indifference to vampires was out of step with the timbre of the times. The most vivid example is the whole Dark Shadows craze that swept through my high school in 1971. For the unversed, Dark Shadows was a popular Gothic daytime TV soap opera about a lovesick vampire who couldn’t remember his lines. Each weekday, kids by the hundreds would race home from school to catch its 4pm broadcast, the following day devoting entire lunchtimes to recounting to one another the sundry supernatural exploits of Barnabas Collins and the rest of the blooper-prone denizens of Collinwood.

Dark Shadows and vampire mania hit my best friend Smedley particularly hard (I attended a Catholic boy’s school where, for some reason, we all addressed one another by our last names), he being so enamored of the show that he took to wearing a cape to school in our Sophomore year. Decades before the term cosplay even existed, Smedley could be seen striding around campus, cape billowing in the wind behind his blue jeans and Adidas sneakers.
The 1972 release of Blacula, the first African-American vampire, emboldened Smedley to add to his ensemble: a heavy wooden cane with a polished silver skull handle, a pentagram pinkie ring with a glass eye in its center, and a black, wide-brimmed hat. Alas, the school’s principal, who’d heretofore proved uncommonly tolerant of a kid wandering the halls of a Catholic school looking like the Prince of Darkness, ultimately intervened, putting a halt to Smedley’s sartorial shenanigans the minute he began taking on the appearance of a teenage Super Fly. Besides, there were no lockers big enough for that hat. 
The Lady in Red Stalks Her Prey

But the Dark Shadows phenomenon was just one aspect of the vampire renaissance of the 1970s. Following a decline in popularity during the sci-fi/atomic monster craze of the ’50s, vampire movies received a much-needed genre transfusion when relaxed censorship regulations in the late-1960s granted filmmakers broader latitude in the depiction of violence and the display of nudity. Free to render explicit all the sexual metaphor and eroticism heretofore only hinted at in previous vampire flicks; there appeared a rash of fang & coffin features virtually awash in Technicolor blood and upholstered with acres of exposed flesh.
Along similar lines, shifts in the ‘70s cultural landscape (race relations, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, gay rights) precipitated occasionally ingenious–but mostly silly–reimaginings of the traditional vampire myth.
Blacula’s William Marshal was cinema’s first African-American vampire, but there were also Kung Fu vampires (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires – 1974), swashbuckling vampires (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter – 1974), and hippie vampires (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – 1971). But most popular of all…for reasons both subversive and prurient…was the female vampire.

Among the glut of horror films about female vampires that flooded the market at the time, films with heavy-breathing titles like Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Daughters of Darkness (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971), only The Velvet Vampire had the distinction of having been directed by a woman.
Celeste Yarnall as Diane Le Fanu
Michael Blodgett as Lee Ritter
Sherry Miles as Susan Ritter

Vapid young couple Lee and Susan Ritter (Michel Blodgett & Sherry Miles, both looking as though they’d just wandered in from a Sun-In© hair lightener commercial) meet vampy vampire Diane Le Fanu (Celeste Yarnall) at a Los Angeles art gallery (The [Bram] Stoker Gallery...wink, wink). Though the couple has been married only two years, the reptilian Lee begins coming on to the raven-haired Diane almost instantly. Diane, whom we’ve just seen overpower and kill an assailant on her way to the gallery (a girl’s gotta eat), responds favorably, meanwhile, Susan struggles hard to process…well, everything.

When Diane invites the blank-eyed pair to spend the weekend at her villa in the Mojave Desert, Lee, ever the horndog, leaps at the offer, while worrywart Susan harbors serious, poorly-articulated misgivings before ultimately acquiescing. Their drive through the desert to Diane's house is plagued with blazing heat, a curious absence of other drivers on the road, engine trouble, and weirdly hostile locals—all ominous harbingers and portents of danger signaling to our hapless couple (imagine a debauched, significantly denser Brad and Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to turn back. But a horny husband is nothing if not determined, so the dull-witted pair soldiers on, heedless of their setbacks, until their car finally stalls out completely, stranding them on a deserted stretch of desert road. But, lo and behold, out of nowhere appears Diane to the rescue in her canary yellow dune buggy!
Yes, although covered from head to toe in the kind of mod, midi-skirt-and-boots ensemble favored by Ann Marie during the final season of That Girl, Diane is clearly a vampire who doesn’t crumble into a heap of dust in the glare of the sun. Similarly, we were shown earlier that she is also a vampire capable of casting a reflection in a mirror; thus it's fair to assume that the gender of our predatory protagonist is not going to be the only deliberate genre subversion The Velvet Vampire has up its cape. 
Diamonds...Daisies...Snowflakes...That Ghoul
  
The trio’s arrival at Diane’s remote desert domicile sees more Gothic clichés upended, as the sun-drenched villa and barren surrounding landscape stand as the living (if one can use that word when speaking of the undead) antithesis to the gloomy castles and foggy moors of Transylvanian legend. Yet the occasional nod to vampire tradition can still be found. For example, there's the nearby, well-populated cemetery harboring a dark, heavily-guarded secret: and by way of a Renfield stand-in, Diane has a devoted Native-American manservant named Juan (Jerry Daniels) who supplies his mistress with victims...but shows no evidence of personally having a taste for rodents or insects.

Having lured the prey to her lair, Diane embarks on an aggressive but ill-defined course of action involving dual seduction, voyeuristic stalking, and mutual dream invasion (Lee and Susan share the same surreal nightmare in which Diane is seen as a dissevering entity…but to what purpose?). The latter point supplying The Velvet Vampire’s only suspense, for we’re as in the dark about Diane’s intentions for the couple as they are. Because her ambiguous objectives have to be carried out before the weekend is over (or before our slow-on-the-pickup newlyweds catch on), the element of time factors in as a source of narrative tension, but there's precious little else. 
Juan (Jerry Daniels), the vigilant vampire valet, catches Susan snooping around
The plot of The Velvet Vampire shares similarities with the far-superior Belgian erotic vampire film Daughters of Darkness, in that both involve sexually-fluid female vampires who become obsessed with a married couple in a less-than-satisfying relationship. Indeed, remove the vampire element, and The Velvet Vampire even foreshadows the aforementioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in its often-humorous depiction (both intentional and un) of the ease with which bland innocence can be corrupted by sophisticated evil.
Daughters of Darkness may even have played a part in The Velvet Vampire poor box-office performance and rapid retreat from theaters in 1971 due to their overlapping release schedules. Both sought to hit the Halloween market by coming out in October, in the SF Bay area, Daughters of Darkness (marketed to the arthouse crowd) was released a full two-weeks before The Velvet Vampire, making the latter look like a bargain-basement, Drive-In imitation by comparison.
above: The Velvet Vampire / below: Daughters of Darkness
In both films, a beautiful female vampire insinuates herself into the lives of a handsome couple. 


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Produced by the legendary Roger Corman as one of the earliest releases from his recently-formed New World Pictures, The Velvet Vampire lives up (or down) to just what you’d expect from the prolific exploitation producer/director known as the “King of the Bs.” There’s stilted dialog, cut-rate production values, clumsy staging, unconvincing special effects, erratic pacing, and some really monumentally bad acting. All of which goes toward making the film both rousingly entertaining and something of a must-see howler for fans of unintentional humor.
"Diane doesn't turn me on. She's a desert freak!"
That being said, The Velvet Vampire is also a film--against all odds and wholly within the restricted confines of exploitation and its own prohibitively modest budget--that nevertheless works. And rather spectacularly.
What gives it distinction and spares it from being just another one cheapie horror entry driven by Corman's grindhouse axiom: “The men are killed, the women are raped,” is that this horror film bears the rare, indelible stamp of having been directed and co-written by a woman: Stephanie Rothman.

Director of one of my favorite off-brand beach party movies- It’s a Bikini World (1967), Corman protégé Stephanie Rothman clearly hasn’t a lot to work with in The Velvet Vampire in terms of either money or onscreen talent; but evident in nearly every frame of the movie is her humor, artistic vision, creative ingenuity, and feminist commitment to subverting as many of the overused tropes and sexist clichés associated with horror movies as possible. All while satisfying the requirements of the genre itself: to supply a higher degree of sensationalized violence and nudity than available in most mainstream films of the time. 
Rothman in a 1973 interview: "I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art
 in which women are always presented nude and men aren't."

PERFORMANCES
There’s a slick professionalism to the look of The Velvet Vampire that’s hard to deny (the cinematography is by onetime Claude
In this priceless exchange, Diane tells Lee that if he's willing to take the time to warm up
 her dune buggy properly, he can ride it as long and as hard as he likes

Third-billed Celeste Yarnall is really the film’s chief asset as the sensuous vampire who may or may not be simply a delusional woman suffering from a rare blood-craving disease. She doesn't have a lot of range, and the role doesn't call for it, but she can act, knows her way around a funny line, and gives the film's most assured performance. Something that can't be said for the rest of the cast. Heavy-lidded Michael Blodgett might be the most high-profile member of the cast, having achieved an immortality of sorts as the leopard-skinned-bikini-wearing gigolo Lance Rocke in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), but he’s an inert presence and practically sleepwalks through his role...which, in a way, suits the film’s subtext pertaining to passive men and resourceful women.
However, the worst offender (thus, my personal favorite) is Sherry Miles, an attractive actress who, when other characters are speaking, always manages to look like she’s translating their words from English into Mandarin Chinese, then back again to English in her head. Possessed of vacant eyes and Dallesandro-flat line delivery, she gives an astonishingly awful performance of the sort that sends MST3K fans into wild ecstatics. I've never seen Miles in anything else, so I can't tell if her flawless depiction of a whiny California bubblehead is comic brilliance or simply doin’ what comes natur’lly. But either way, I treasure every moment she's onscreen.
Interviews with the director and DVD commentary by Celeste Yarnall affirm that Miles, a former teen model who'd achieved a level of success on TV, was "difficult" during the filming. The most startling disclosure of all is that she actually had her acting coach (!?) on set and consulted with them frequently

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Movies being what they were, Hollywood being what it is, and heterosexual men being what they are, the whole Lesbian Vampire Craze was but a ‘70s pop-culture mashup of age-old sex and violence tropes customized for the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement. Facing criticism for their violent victimization of women and routine depiction of them as passive targets of male aggression, horror films hoped to make amends by turning the tables and reassigning the strong-but-sexy femme fatale paradigm of film noir to the vampire genre. In this context the woman is allowed to both propel the plot and be an agent of violent action while still pandering to the conventional male perception that women possessing such qualities (strength, aggression, self-preservation) are essentially dangerous, to be feared, and not actually "real" women.  
The lesbian vampires in these films were seldom (if ever) really lesbian, rather, they were the usual projected male fantasy: women of such voracious sexual appetite that they are drawn to both sexes equally. If a female preference was shown by the vampire, it was invariably conveyed in ways which reinforced butch/fem - dominant/passive stereotypes.

But this was the '70s, and during the era of the buddy-picture, the anti-hero, and all the many male-centric movie trends of the time; the image of woman as self-directed predator was not only a refreshing change of pace, but this female-centric angle brought about the welcome introduction of the heroine who is capable of saving herself, or, better still, rescuing the hero.
The Velvet Vampire largely plays by the genre rules, but from its haunting and surreal dream sequences to its subtle feminist self-awareness, it remains a very watchable film that uses the feminine gaze to play fast and loose with what we've come to expect from a horror movie.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It wasn’t until I was in film school and saw F. W. Murnau’s brilliant Nosferatu (1922) that my antipathy towards vampire movies underwent a change. That was about 1976. I became a full-fledged convert when I saw Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing remake of Nosferatu in 1979. Since then I’ve come to appreciate vampire movies for their atmosphere and sensual mystery. I no longer felt they had to be "scary" in order to be effective.
Murnau's and Herzog's films inspired me to better appreciate was the nightmarish, melancholy side of what a vampire curse suggested. To be doomed to an eternity of unappeasable longing (for blood and for love, as vampires are often linked to some kind of romantic yearning) is to forever be forced to confront and live with the loss of hope. It’s a dreadful fate to contemplate, but one so humanly compelling that vampire films that even tangentially address this issue (The Hunger- 1983 and The Addiction -1995, come to mind) tend to become favorites.
In order to meet the more sensational requirements of the exploitation genre, Rothman's screenplay (co-written with Maurice Charles and her husband Charles S. Swartz) had minimal opportunity to address the side of the story relating to Diane's loneliness and bereaved longing for her (very, very) late husband

The Velvet Vampire is not on par with either of the above-mentioned films by any reasonable aesthetic comparison, but in terms of the capturing a feminine perspective and breathing new life (there’s that word again) into the vampire mythos, I’d say Stephanie Rothman’s film is a more than worthy member of the genre sisterhood.


Copyright © Ken Anderson

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

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 setindividuals 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 ClydeThey 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 rapewas 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 Dollsa 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 ArchiesThe 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