To celebrate Arrow Video’s release of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, we take a look back at the movie that saw Russ Meyer reach a new kind of maturity.
It wouldn’t last long…
A few years ago, when I didn’t live with a girl and I wasn’t married, my complete collection of Russ Meyer movies wasn’t really an issue.
Up until then I could happily justify my love for Russ Meyer, the ultimate cult film director who basically invented his own entire genre and completely mastered it. That genre of course being ‘satirical, grindhouse, pop-art sexploitation’ featuring some of the most ass-kicking women ever committed to celluloid.
The other thing about Russ Meyer that becomes harder to justify, is his most famous and prominent of obsessions: tits.
Big, giant, massive tits. He loves them. They are everywhere in his movies.
Hence why, when my DVD collection merged with my loved one’s, a box-set like this suddenly sticks out like a… well… big pair of tits.
“Why do have this?”
“Oh it’s not what you think, it’s not porn.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, Russ Meyer’s a really important filmmaker. He was a deeply innovative storyteller, using revolutionary editing techniques and eye-popping production design. Also, the women in his movies were always the protagonists, driving the plot and were way more powerful than the male characters, who were often portrayed as pathetic and impotent. Meyer refused to play by the rules and is probably even more worthy of auteur status than Hitchcock.”
“But why all the big tits?”
“He just liked them.”
Even with those justifications, it’s still difficult to think of films like Up or Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens as anything more than a random sequence of increasingly titillating events. They are incredible for their stream-of-conscious, freewheeling structure and sexual liberation, but it’s hard to look beyond all the double-ended dildos and big bouncing breasts.
However, there is one movie in Russ Meyer’s back catalogue that stands out as being, if not ‘tasteful’ then perhaps his most coherent, plot-driven and dare I say… mainstream. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [1969] is a 20th Century Fox production, co-written by Roger Ebert, the most well-respected film critic of all time, that managed to gross 10 times its budget and became a hit for the then-beleaguered film company.
Yet despite all of its ‘mainstream cred’ it remains truly a Russ Meyer film, in terms of innovation, satirical bite and yes, giant bouncy tits.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls came at a time just after the success of Easy Rider and before Jaws ruined it all, when cash-strapped Hollywood studios were desperate to find unknown filmmakers, give them a budget and let them do whatever the hell they wanted to with it because there was a strong box office justification. Meyer was an investment that made sound financial sense to Fox, as he already had a long prolific career making huge returns from very modest budgets thanks in part to the tightly controlled, economic way he ran his shoots.
Originating as a straight-up sequel to the highly melodramatic Valley of the Dolls, Meyer and co-writer Ebert instead concocted a satirical version of the original Jacqueline Susann novel, ramping up the camp, the sex, the violence and the general debauchery and adding their own brand of endlessly quotable, impossible-to-take-seriously dialogue; “you will taste the black sperm of my vengeance.”
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is the tale of three friends, Kelly, Casey and Petronella who along with their simpering, ineffectual manager Harris, decide to take their rock band on the road to LA. There they meet a cavalcade of eccentric Svengalis, drug peddling scumbags and heavyweight champions of the world, who lead all three women down a spiral of self-destruction.
The film dances between set-pieces, with car-crash style editing and heavily-stilted dialogue, but each scene is fascinating for its sheer brazen commitment to its cause. It’s the kind of film that watching back more than 40 years later, you assume is an unintentionally funny, camp classic. But that’s not the case. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was designed to be a satire. The major reason why it’s so tonally extravagant and hilariously off the mark is because Meyer and Ebert were satirising a world they had no experience with. They were outside the system, heroically so, and therefore they let their imaginations run wild when it came to sculpting the behaviour of the hipsters, charlatans and freaks they had only read about in tabloids. “This is my happening, and it FREAKS ME OUT!”
There is, naturally, a lot of sex. More so than your average mainstream movie that isn’t really about sex, and there is, of course, boundless cleavage to be viewed from every angle possible. What separates this from other Meyer films is that it’s perhaps not as exploitative as the others. Nudity happens as a natural part of the mise-en-scène rather than to… no, I’m sorry I couldn’t get through that with a straight face… Let’s try again… Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn’t quite as desperate to shove nipples in your face just because you haven’t seen any for three or four minutes. I know this isn’t a great reason why it’s Meyer’s most ‘grown-up’ movie, but based on my opening gambit, I felt it was an important final point to make.
This mainstream bubble of success couldn’t last long though. Russ Meyer would be allowed to make one more film in his three-picture deal with Fox, the almost entirely courtroom based misfire The Seven Minutes. It bombed horribly, and Meyer was released back into the wild, never to be part of the system ever again. But he had a renewed creative vigour and would spend the next decade making some of his most controversial and off-the-chart movies before retiring an incredibly happy man, having retained the rights to almost all of his movies and making millions from distributing them on the home video market from the 1980s onwards. Russ Meyer was a truly independent artist who did things exactly his own way.
Who also loved big tits.
For more in-depth and slightly wayward film analysis, check out our movie features section including our crap 90s thriller club: Body of Evidence.