Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Posted on March 1, 2013 at 1:11 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The late 60’s and early 70’s saw Hollywood studios flailing and gesticulating, desperate to catch the attention of an audience that was turning on to films like Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), as well as the growing influence of world cinema, with its more risqué sex and challenging material. Old-fashioned, big-budget, all-star melodramas and musicals no longer clicked with audiences, and the studio system seemed to be in its death throes. As is well known – and mythologized – the decline of the studio system quickly paved the way for New Hollywood: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1968), Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and so on. But this era, particularly in its early years, also saw the release of confused, “I Have No Idea What You Kids Want” pictures like Skidoo (1968), with its pseudo-psychedelia and Groucho Marx playing a gangster called God, and Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which imported a French director (Roger Vadim) to present a sensationalistic exposé of high school promiscuity. (These films are being rapidly excavated as DVD distributors such as Warner Archive realize there’s an eager audience for them after all.) The well-endowed Queen of all these orphans is without a doubt Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).

The (fake) Carrie Nations perform with the (real) Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Twentieth Century Fox had noticed that an independent softcore skin flick called Vixen (1968), one of the first films to be rated X, had grossed millions of dollars – possibly as much as 15 million, if Meyer is to be believed – on a very small budget of $72,000; as Jimmy McDonough writes in his excellent Meyer bio Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the film ran for fifty-four weeks at an Elgin, Illinois drive-in called the Starlite, and forty-three weeks in Chicago, which would place Meyer firmly in Roger Ebert’s radar. The film was the Blair Witch Project of its day. Although Fox could have easily produced low-budget skin flicks of their own – nudity is a pretty cheap special effect – the studio honchos must have recognized something special in Meyer. Perhaps it was the way Vixen busted taboos (Lesbianism! Incest!) while maintaining a certain cheerful innocence. Perhaps it was his miserly way with his budgets. Perhaps it was his speed: while Vixen was still raking in the cash, his next film, the delirious, Charles Napier-starring acid trip Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1969), hit the grindhouses. Or perhaps they simply didn’t want to waste too much time and thought in deciphering what made Vixen so unique from all other sex films – it is, after all, a deeply odd little firecracker – and just wanted to co-opt the talent. The studio gates opened, and Meyer delivered the contraband. Ebert would write on the film’s tenth anniversary, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seems more and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.” Of course, he was one of those lunatics, and is quite proud of the fact.

Ashley St. Ives (Edy Williams, whom Russ Meyer would marry) seduces Harris Allsworth (David Gurian).

Meyer contacted Ebert after discovering that the critic was a fan; fast friends, the director asked him to write a screenplay to fulfill the first of his three-picture deal with Fox. The studio intended to create a sequel to the 1967 hit Valley of the Dolls, based on the Jacqueline Susann novel about love, showbiz, and barbiturates. After aborted attempts to make a straight-faced sequel, the studio was open to a more irreverent take by Meyer & Ebert. They paid little attention during the production process. The laissez-faire approach meant that the screenplay, “written in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time” (Ebert’s words), was put before the cameras without modification, all of its lunacy intact. If anything, Meyer only added to the crazy, applying his increasingly avant-garde editing approach, whose rhythms at times achieve a strobe effect, and musical selections that form an additional layer of satirical comment, from Stu Phillips’ soap opera strains during moments of melodrama, to, most notoriously, the use of the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare to underscore a graphic decapitation. Though this is his big-budget break, Meyer doesn’t skimp on the expected RM motifs. There’s the presence of a German (Henry Rowland) who is implied to be the Nazi Martin Bormann, this being a peculiar running gag in the work of the director, who served as a cameraman during WWII (as to Rowland, he returned to the role of Martin Bormann in Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens). There’s the cameo by the amusingly grotesque “Princess Livingston,” who also appeared in Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) and Mudhoney (1965). Meyer veterans Charles Napier and Erica Gavin (Vixen herself!) have significant supporting roles. And, of course, there’s the fact that nearly every actress looks like a voluptuous 1960’s Playboy bunny – an aesthetic the pin-up photographer helped create in his years working for Hugh Hefner.

RM breaks from his usual technique of rapid cross-cutting by overlaying his key characters into the same frame during a Carrie Nations musical number.

The story itself is so happily convoluted that it’s barely worth summarizing. Suffice it to say that a Josie and the Pussycats-style girl group, the Carrie Nations (named after the violent anti-alcohol crusader of the turn of the century), journeys to Los Angeles and succumbs to all the temptations of showbiz, embodied by greedy, leering lawyer Porter Hall (Duncan McLeod) and the Phil Spector-like impresario Z-Man (John Lazar), whose too-florid dialogue trips clumsily over its Shakespeare. Lead singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) navigates both manipulators on her quest to rock ‘n’ roll superstardom, and dumps her boyfriend (David Gurian) for a worldly Adonis named Lance Rocke (Michael Blodgett); while her bandmates Petronella (Marcia McBroom) and Casey (Cynthia Myers) struggle through relationship problems of their own. It’s a nice touch that the girls are doing drugs at the very start of the film; Hollywood just brings wilder dangers, as delivered through the fevered imaginations of Ebert & Meyer. Soon enough someone ends up in a wheelchair, and a drug-fueled costume party, set to Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” leads to a few surprising same-sex couplings as well as grisly murder.

Z-Man (John Lazar) initiates a night of wild abandon.

Meyer was supposed to deliver an R-rated film, but was given an X instead (which he found frustrating, given how much X-rated material he’d forced himself to abandon to the cutting room floor). The movie was not a flop, though perhaps it was perceived as one, and most of the reviews were harsh, as critics saw tasteless trash instead of dead-on satire. One of the film’s harshest critics was none other than Gene Siskel. He panned the film upon its release, and when he gave it a second chance in 1993, lamented, “It’s even worse than I thought.” Meyer made only one more film of his three-picture deal with Fox, The Seven Minutes (1971) – an almost-forgotten movie on the (personal) subject of censorship – before embarking on the last phase of his career, returning to the life of an independent filmmaker, and turning up the sex and violence to even more cartoonish degrees. But Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was quick to discover a cult following, to the point that it is now one of the most popular of cult classics, and a frequent pick for revival screenings (including, naturally, at Ebertfest). It received a special edition DVD release from Fox as part of its “Cinema Classics Collection” (!), with supplements originally prepared for a Criterion release before Fox decided the film was good enough to call its own.

A "triple ceremony" gives the film an improbable happy ending.

It’s perhaps easier for more people to love the film now, with decades removed and the contemporary trappings providing an extra layer of amusement. For one, the songs (which Siskel hated) are actually a lot of fun, pastiches of psychedelic rock: vocalist Lynn Carey, whose voice Dolly Read lip-synchs, impressively channels her inner Grace Slick. (In one of the many head-spinning absurdities surrounding Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a dispute with Carey’s managers resulted in a different vocalist appearing on the soundtrack LP. So the original LP is a singer not heard in a film which features a singer being dubbed by another singer. The CD, thankfully, has all the tracks you need.)  The songs fit right alongside Strawberry Alarm Clock, who appear on-screen singing “Incense and Peppermints” and other songs, while Z-Man shouts the immortal “This is my happening, and it freaks me out!” – a moment to which Mike Myers paid homage in his first, and best, Austin Powers. There are many, many quotable lines here, which means the film requires multiple viewings so you can anticipate them with pleasure. And there’s so much crammed into this film that it impresses on each revisit: Meyer cuts so quickly, and Ebert’s plot moves so fast, that at 109 minutes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls features enough melodramatic incident to qualify it as a Gone with the Wind-style epic. Which it is, in a way – if only Scarlett O’Hara attended these types of parties.

The Carrie Nations perform while tragedy looms above.

But the reason I love Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is how it treats first-time viewers. It pulls the rug out from them slowly. It’s easy to laugh at the film as it begins, with the fake-hippie folk of “Come With the Gentle People” playing over the Carrie Nations’ fateful journey to L.A., and overcooked “youth” dialogue like “Hey, don’t bogart the joint.” But, if one’s not already attuned to it, it’s remarkable how the film gets nuttier and nuttier until the epiphany finally arrives that the filmmakers are in on the joke. They’re laughing (as Ebert said, “maniacally”) along with you. The climax has the John Waters aura of being quite contentedly beyond good taste, which means its spirit is aligned not with Jacqueline Susann but with the midnight movie, which it would ultimately become; and the denouement, with its triple wedding and villain Porter Hall glaring through the church window, could not make its comedy any plainer. I’m mystified when some classify this as a “bad movie.” To those standing in the church, it’s a rare and brilliant thing.

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The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Posted on February 23, 2013 at 10:43 am by Jeff Kuykendall

When movies learned to talk, they forgot how to see. The advent of sound was such a distraction that elegant story construction through visuals was temporarily a lost art. Just watch The Thief of Bagdad (1924) to be reminded of how sophisticated silent cinema had become by the mid-20’s. Cinematic language had evolved rapidly in the twenty-nine years since the Lumière brothers patented the cinematograph, and Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939), whose film career began in 1915, was an important player in the key period of film’s transition into lavish spectacle. (The recent documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey posits that The Thief of Bagdad‘s stated moral, “Happiness Must Be Earned,” specifically reflects the morals of Hollywood’s newly monied.) Fairbanks was one of the first movie stars, and helped to define what that meant: athletic, charismatic, and fronting big-budget productions with wide appeal. His Arabian Nights pastiche was released at the height of his popularity (which would decline rapidly when the Talkies came): he made headlines by co-founding United Artists and marrying the most popular actress of the day, Mary Pickford; he was coming off a string of hits, The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921), and Robin Hood (1922). He could do no wrong – never mind that his relationship with Pickford began while she was still married – and The Thief of Bagdad sealed the deal. It is a wonder to behold. The towering sets, the imaginative use of special effects, the neck-risking stuntwork by Fairbanks: it is cinema as a visceral dream. Sound would be extraneous.

Frontispiece from the 1924 film novelization, written by the then-popular author of exotic romances, Achmed Abdullah.

As for the story itself, it is not faithful to any particular Arabian Nights story, but rather borrows scattered elements to assemble an Orientalist romance and adventure that would seem comfortable to audiences who had enjoyed Fairbanks’ Robin Hood and Zorro. There is a flying horse, as in “The History of the Third Calender” and “The Story of the Enchanted Horse,” and a flying carpet, as in “The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari Banou.” There is an imperiled princess and a valiant hero, as in so many of the Nights. But it’s an original, emerging from Fairbanks’ fevered imagination: he gets a story credit, and was producer, working closely with director Raoul Walsh and production designer William Cameron Menzies. The film is designed to hit every sensationalistic note in its two-and-a-half hour running time: prophecies, monsters, magic, swordfights, harem girls, Mongol invaders, and a dashing thief (Fairbanks) who loses his heart to the Caliph’s daughter (Julanne Johnston). Walsh had been directing films since 1913, but given that he’s now best known for his studio work of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s (in particular the classic James Cagney film White Heat), it’s always something of a surprise to be reminded that he helmed a multi-million dollar extravaganza like The Thief of Bagdad. His collaboration with Fairbanks here is noteworthy not just for its scope, but for its delightful affinity with the breathless and imaginative films of Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. The sight gags frequently rely upon Fairbanks’ stuntwork, such as a memorable sequence in which he hops, like a cartoon character, from one oversized jar to another (courtesy a hidden trampoline), or another in which he breezily escapes the Caliph’s palace by walking blindly off a wall, grabbing hold of a tree, and bending it to the ground. Like those great silent comics, he makes it look easy. In the finale, when he and Johnston ride the flying carpet over the throngs of Bagdad, it’s not trick photography: they’re really sailing perilously through the sky on a steel platform suspended by piano wires attached to a swinging crane.

Ahmed (Douglas Fairbanks) holds hostage a Mongol slave (Anna May Wong) beside the bed of the sleeping princess (Julanne Johnston).

But what always sticks firmest in my mind is Menzies’ production design, which consciously evokes fairy tale illustrations. Those extraordinary sets that tower above the actors; the oversized props such as the gigantic jars through which Fairbanks makes his escape; the strangely curved portals and windows, like a more sensuous version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; the “shining” streets of the city that are actually polished enamel floors; the huge, multi-limbed idol that squats in the desert; the undersea kingdom of (real) blown glass through which Fairbanks swims before battling a giant spider; or Bagdad’s fearsome gate, which opens in four snaggletoothed sections, like the mandibles of a colossal insect. I first saw this film some years ago with live organ accompaniment at a revival theater that specialized in silent films, and was transported; but the new Blu-Ray from the Cohen Media Group is an ideal showcase, featuring a new restoration, a perfect score by Carl Davis that uses themes from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and the color tinting from the original release. The film looks brand new, and in high-definition you are easily lured into the world of The Thief of Bagdad.

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Zardoz (1974)

Posted on February 17, 2013 at 10:21 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Every time I watch Zardoz (1974) – which, I admit, is becoming increasingly often – I have flashbacks to my first viewing, which made such a deep impression on me as a child. It was being aired on television. A giant stone head with a bearded, fearsome countenance and crystal eyes settled slowly, like a UFO, upon the ground in a misty field. It is approached by chanting warriors, on foot and on horseback, wearing plaster heads resembling the mammoth stone idol, which dwarfs them. Suddenly, out of its mouth pour a tidal wave of rifles. The warriors pick up the guns and fire them into the air. The head lifts back into the sky and sails off, drifting in slow-motion while the credits roll. That I remembered (and a later scene in which a group of immortals sitting at a dinner table communicate via telepathy); when I revisited the film as a teenager I was shocked to recall what did not stand out to my still-forming mind – the god Zardoz intoning that “The Gun is Good. Penis is evil. The Penis shoots seeds and makes new life to poison the earth with the plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth and kill. Zardoz has spoken.” Of course, these lines were entirely more memorable to a snickering teenager; just as my older self relished the more outré elements, such as the decapitated opening narrator with a black-marker goatee who asks us, “Is God in show business?”, or the sight of a bemused Sean Connery wearing a wedding dress. Flash forward another decade and a half. A Blockbuster Video is going out of business, selling off its inventory. I don’t hesitate to pick up the DVD of Zardoz at a steal. Popping it in that evening, I am shocked to discover: I like this film. A few more viewings, like an addict: no, I love this film.

Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), the alter ego of the god Zardoz, delivers a most awkward introduction to the film.

Which is not to say that Zardoz is a masterpiece or without flaws. It is misguided and hopelessly pretentious. Though it sells itself as a satire, in execution it’s wilfully naïve and unintentionally silly. It is the kind of film that could only be made in this particular era, if not this particular moment, heavily influenced by the psychedelic 60’s and lurking in the shadow of Kubrick’s ultra-austere science fiction diptych, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971): note the heavy use of classical music and the languid pace. But unlike many similar efforts in this direction – say, Robert Altman’s sleep-inducing Quintet (1979) – writer/director John Boorman invests himself so personally into his over-ambitious production that, like the hero of the story, he breaks through to a realm entirely unique; and, improbably, the film works. There is a reason the visuals stuck with me as a child, rather than the ridiculous dialogue: these images are the stuff of dreams. Doubtless the film made a deep impression on my imagination. While I was embracing scenes of X-Wing starfighters raiding the Death Star, there was reserved, in one particular pocket of my mind, the concept that giant stone heads could drift slowly through the sky, animated by unknown powers, serving an unknown purpose. And since I didn’t catch the entire film on that viewing – let’s face it, I probably wouldn’t have understood the plot anyway – it remained a mystery, and settled there as a perfect, unsolvable one until I finally found it again in my teenage years and learned the “twist” of what the name “Zardoz” truly meant (which I won’t spoil here, not that it necessarily spoils anything at all).

Zed (Sean Connery) discovers the home of Arthur Frayn. The writing on the wall says, "In this secret room/from the past/I seek the future."

Boorman’s always been terrific with powerful images – he was coming off a major hit, Deliverance (1972), and would follow up Zardoz with the visually arresting but incredibly stupid Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) before making the better-regarded Excalibur (1981). But it should be said that he has an intriguing story in Zardoz, if one chooses to pay attention to the plot rather than the nonstop distractions, such as Sean Connery in that wedding dress. It has the feel of a science fiction Ace paperback from the 60’s. In the year 2293, Earth is divided into two realms: the Outlands and the Vortex. In the savage Outlands, “Brutals” are considered disgusting because they age, have sex, and reproduce. They are kept enslaved (and raped, and murdered) by the gun-wielding Exterminators, who worship the stone idol Zardoz in promise that when they die they will pass into the Vortex and become immortal. Zed (Connery) takes a shortcut by stowing away on the stone head, where he shoots one of those immortals, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), before penetrating the paradise of the Vortex. He discovers Frayn’s home and learns that he created Zardoz to control the Outlands. Subsequently Zed is drawn into a political battle among three of the immortals, May (Sara Kestelman, Lisztomania), Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Night Porter), and Friend (John Alderton, Upstairs, Downstairs); when Friend becomes too rebellious, he is punished by his peers, forcefully aged to “Second Level” [corrected – see the Comments] and sent to a retirement community with the senile. While May investigates Zed’s curious origins – she discovers he’s the result of selective breeding instigated by Frayn – Zed inspires a revolt, rousing even the listless “Apathetics” in his attempt to bring down the invisible barrier that separates the elite from the commoners.

Zed is interrogated by the immortals of the Vortex, including Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), Friend (John Alderton), and May (Sara Kestelman).

There are traces of The Time Machine in Boorman’s script, with the immortals somewhat resembling the Eloi, evolved separate from the Morlocks; but these Eloi are intelligent and manipulative, realizing only too late that one of their savages has been manipulating them. Still, this theme could be related more coherently; though Boorman, admirably, lets about twenty minutes of the film pass before the script finally settles into dialogue, once the talking begins it never really lets up. The filmed-at-the-last-minute prologue with Arthur Frayn is genuinely dopey and out of place. Finally, Connery is miscast – there’s too much of James Bond in his eyes for him to convincingly play a savage. Those caveats aside, there’s plenty of wildness and eccentricity on display to keep the viewer engaged, such as Connery alarming/impressing a crowd with his (off-camera) erection, or just the sight of him pulling a cart through a village. There’s a notably beautiful sequence in which images are projected upon semi-clothed and unclothed bodies – representing a psychic transference of High Art – which proves how one can do “trippy” relatively cheaply. An elaborate tracking shot across a bacchanal of Apathetics, which ends with the revelation of the Bride Connery, is impressively staged as well, like something out of a Ken Russell film. And the use of the “Allegretto” portion of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92, is undeniably effective, whether in accompaniment to the floating head of Zardoz or the final, eerie time-lapse scenes that take place in a dark cave.

Zed discovers the brain that controls the Vortex.

Ultimately, Zardoz doesn’t need defending. It’s not a forgotten obscurity – it started to build a cult following early through TV viewings like the one I caught, and for decades it was a video store staple; the DVD, released in 2000, even brings us a (slightly apologetic) commentary track by Boorman and a gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and production art. (An HD upgrade would be welcome, and is, I think, inevitable.) I have seen tributes ranging from Zardoz cosplay to a mock-up of an 80’s arcade game that never really existed. Many enjoy it because it’s “so bad it’s good,” though I would argue that the truth is more complicated. Zardoz has a lot to recommend it – some genuine virtues – and it is perhaps easier to enjoy now as an artifact of its time, overreaching, absurd, but unexpectedly rewarding. It never takes too long before the mood strikes me again, and I’ll pay another visit to the Vortex, where Arthur Frayn will welcome me: “I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue, rich in irony and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may. Be warned, lest you end as I!”

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