A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, September 7, 2026

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

Marcia McBroom, Dolly Read, and Cynthia Myers in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Cast: Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John Lazar, Michael Blodgett, David Gurian, Edy Williams, Erica Gavin, Phyllis Davis, Harrison Page, Duncan McLeod, James Iglehart, Charles Napier. Screenplay: Roger Ebert, Russ Meyer. Cinematography: Fred J. Koenekamp. Art direction: Arthur Lonergan, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Dann Cahn, Dick Wormell. Music: Stu Phillips. 

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a spoof of racy melodramas like Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls, which made a lot of money for 20th Century Fox in 1967. And of the T&A-filled sexploitation movies in which Meyer specialized. And of the kind of movies that Roger Ebert used to give a thumbs-down to at the Chicago Sun-Times and on the TV show he shared with Gene Siskel. The movie was Ebert's one venture into screenwriting, and he and Meyer concoct a lot of perilous situations for the trio of girl rockers who are at the center of the movie. Kelly (Dolly Read), Casey (Cynthia Myers), and Pet (Marcia McBroom) hit LA with high hopes, and are immediately swept up into a whirlwind of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. There's a nefarious financial advisor (Duncan McLeod) who wants to cheat Kelly out of an inheritance, and a sleazy producer (John Lazar) who wants to make his fortune off of them. The group's manager (David Gurian), loves Kelly but gets involved with a porn star (Edy Williams). A fashion designer (Erica Gavin) seduces Cynthia into a lesbian affair. A young law student (Harrison Page) takes up with Pet but is edged out by a heavyweight champion boxer (James Iglehart). And there are some deaths and an abortion and a surprise gender reveal.... The movie is busy, noisy, and packed with outrageous incidents, but the one thing it isn't is funny. The dialogue and  jokes are leaden, like the "moral lessons" attached to each of its principal characters at the end of the film. Can it be that Ebert, earnest in all of his film criticism, didn't have much of a sense of humor? The movie is one of John Waters's favorites, as you might expect from that connoisseur of trash, but I wonder if it isn't because he secretly knows that he did this sort of thing a lot better.


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