Saturday, 29 February 2020

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Russ Meyer takes Hollywood

This the story of the Carrie Nations, a rock trio of innocent young women who travel to LA with dreams of stardom and end up seduced and destroyed by their Dionysian hosts. Or something.


It has been a good few years since I last watched a Russ Meyer movie. Last week the Academy held a screening so I decided to check it out and get the full Meyer experience on the big screen. Watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was like biting into a brand of cookie you haven't eaten since childhood. If that cookie was a whole pack of cookies, and each one was laced with cocaine.

Made with all the resources of the studio system and armed with a script by noted critic Roger Ebert - whose credit appears onscreen at the tail end of sequence in which a woman is shot dead and Martin Bormann is impaled on a sword by an unknown assailant dressed in cape, crown and thigh high boots.

A compendium of soap opera cliches, a blunt satire on a familiar story, a testament to the desperation of Twentieth Century Fox, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is as hilarious as it is jaw-droppingly superficial.

Meyer movies are not known for their plots - this is one exception where a surplus of plot works for Meyer’s familiar aesthetic: canted angles, sharp editing and vibrant colours.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls constantly feels like it is shoving so many characters and subplots that it always feels like it’s about to explode. Somehow, Meyer's razor-sharp editingkeeps the whole confection moving. It smooths out most of the tonal shifts and gives the film a sense of pace that means any dead spots pass by quickly.

In a rare turn, it is the men who are the most interesting characters in the movie, at least performance-wise. Dolly Read brings a wide-eyed naivete to her role as Kelly, but her fellow Carrie Nations are a little colourless. The characters are all archetypes, but the women kind of melt into the ensemble. Read's overly earnst performance is very funny, but it is not as vibrantly alive as Tura Satana in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! nor as hypnotising as Erica Gavin in Vixen!

By contrast, Beyond... offers a break from the usual neanderthal-cuckold archetypes who usually occupy Meyer's universe. Instead, Roger Ebert's script offers get fifty colours of a**hole: the peak of the bunch is Michael Blodgett as Lance Rocke, a simpering gigolo who uses his good looks to seduce and milk every woman he can. Duncan McLeod is a sleazy hypocritical lawyer who tries to cheat Kelly out of her inheritance, and future blaxploitation fixture James Iglehart plays Randy Black, a clear Muhammed Ali clone who equates everything to boxing. There is even a cameo from fugitive Nazi Martin Bormann (played by Henry Rowland, who would return as Bormann in multiple Meyer epics).
Towering above them all (for reasons beyond his performance) is John LaZar as Z-Man, the Phil Spector-inspired record producer who takes the women under his wing. With a cut glass delivery (inspired by Laurence Olivier) and all of the film's best/most memorable lines, within minutes Z-Man has stolen the film out from under its milquetoast leads.

Parts of the film were improvised on the set, and the most memorable is the revelation that Z-Man  is a woman, sorry, Superwoman). Coming at the last possible minute, it is followed by an ridiculously violent masacre in which Z-Man's romantic overtures are rejected and she proceeds to shoot and/or stab her party guests to death.

This sequence also feels very Meyer in a way that is impossible not to criticise. In the mid-60s, Meyer had discovered a formula for making exploitation palatable to the American mainstream: sex is punished.

It is a familiar subtext in a lot of American popular culture, and Meyer milked in through what is now known as his 'roughie' period: In movies like Lorna and Mudhoney, Meyer would start by giving the punters what they wanted: nudity, a bit of action, and then at the climax, he would have his main characters punished. For example, at the end of her movie, Lorna dies.

Meyer brings it back for the climax of Beyond..., having Z-Man dispatch a couple of the film's villains, before killing the film's gay couple. In a movie where nothing is supposed to matter, this moment hits differently. It does not help that one of those characters spends the movie struggling with her sexuality. In the preceding scene, she finally finds resolution in the arms of a woman (played by Vixen! herself, Erica Gavin).

While it feels like the morality of the times, Meyer's previous movie Vixen! had included a subplot in which Vixen seduces a woman - and she was not punished for it. I have two theories about this plot turn:

a) Meyer was a noted homophobe who - rumour has it - divorced one of his wives when he found out she liked women as much as he did.

b) maybe working for a big studio spooked the filmmaker and he decided to provide a moral sop to reactionaries in his audience.

It could be a combination of both. Whatever the cause, Z-Man's revelation-turned-rampage is the biggest tonal shift in the movie, and the moment where the film's sense of parody goes out the window and the film becomes a straight exploitation piece. While Meyer's movies had featured scenes of violence before, there is nothing like the carnage here. You could feel the temperature in the room change when a couple of major characters die. After this movie, Meyer would crank up the violence until he tipped over into the nihilistic transgressions featured in Up!, one of his worst films .

After Z-Man is defeated, the film swings hard in the opposite direction with a triple wedding and a miraculous recovery from paraplegia. As you do.

Meyer had his cast play the script dead seriously, betting that film would be far funnier if no one was in on the joke. The decision is a resounding success. If this movie were played with any sense of knowingness it would be insufferable.

At the screening I saw, the audience were dying. They were clearly confused, but we all fell for every bizarre plot turn and ridiculous line. As the credits rolled, the tonal whiplash of the double finale seemed to have left most of them stunned and/or dazed.

Meyer loved bright, vibrant colours (particularly red). The transfer at the screening I saw was crystal clear. It's the best-looking Meyer movie I have ever seen.

While it does not have the vibrance of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is one of his best and most polished films. Meyer's time in the studio would be short-lived, but at least for one movie he delivered all the hallmarks of his bizarre milieu.

For previous entries...

The Meyer Files #1: The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)



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