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When naive New England country girl Ann (Barbara Parkins) moves to the big city, she
soon becomes entangled in the showbiz-world, working for an theatrical agent,
Lyon Burke (Paul Burke), whom she falls in love with.She is soon repelled
by the business, when she sees old stage star Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) fire
Neely (Patty Duke), a very talented young singer. But since her boyfriend Burke
has a good heart, he soon gets her a gig in a tv-show, where she is discovered
& soon becomes a Broadway star, & after a time she even moves to
Hollywood to star in movies. Of course, the transition from good-natured singer
into filmstar does not come without the descent into drug addiction ...
Her partner in many films, Tony (Tony Scotti), is magnaged by his domineerting
sister Miriam (Lee Grant), but when he marries beautiful but talentless chorus
girl Jennifer (Sharon Tate), he falls from grace with the Hollywood bigwigs,
& furthermore it soon turns out he is terminally ill, by a disease
affecting both his muscles & his mental abilities - & he is sent off to
a sanatorium while his wife has to go to Europe to do skinflicks to support
him.
Ann m,eanwhile breaks up with Burke as he refuses to marry her, but instead
of being devastated, she launches a career of her own, starring in cosmetics
commercials, & before you know it, she's in Hollywood as well, meets up
with Burke again, they discover they are still in love with each other &
she becomes - I don't know, his housewife.
Together they are trying to persuade Neely, whose drug-addiction is ruining
her career, to go to a sanatorium, but she instead flees to San Francisco,
where she overdoses & wakes up in a hospital - from where Ann & Burke
take her to a sanatorium after all.
As fate has it, it is the same sanatorium Tony is in, & one night, when
Neely things what once was their tune, Tony wakes from his catatonia (if only
for a few minute) & joins her in singing.
Cheesy as this may sound (& yes it is every bit as cheesy as it sounds),
this is the turning point in her healing process, & soon Burke gets her
another show on Broadway. When she needs more support from Burke though than he
can give her from the West Coast, he temporarily moves back to New York -
without Ann, & soon starts an affair with Neely, driving Ann into taking
drugs ...
Jennifer in the meantime gets out of her skinflick-contract to great
disaddvantage for herself, &, when back in America, discovers she has
breastcancer - & she commits suicide as a result.
Back in New York, Neely gets into a fight with Helen Lawson, who years ago
fires her, & it seems Neely would win, too, but Helen still knows a trick
or two, as she calmly convinces Burke that Neely is not the girl for him, he
needs a good girl ...
Speaking of good girls, Ann has meanwhile abandoned drugs & moved back
to New England (though I always thought living in New England would be a good
enough reason to start taking drugs), & when Burke shows up on her doorstep
& proposes to her, she declines ...
& speaking of drugs, Neely has of course started to take them again,
& has blown her Broadway show,. ending up half-crazy on the streets of New
York ...
This movie is in fact a kitschy & hypocritical celebration of 1950's
values, the virtues of innocence & life in a small town, & its
underlying message seems to be this is what happens when a woman has
ambitions to become anything but a housewife/secretary. The story goes
about this every bit as blunt as a 1930's drug-scare movie, with the difference
that the drug-scare movies had a certain cheap charme due to a script largely
ignorant of any real facts of the subject it is about, a rushed production
schedule & a miniscule budget.
Valley of the Dolls has of course no such excuses, as sufficient
money was involved, & my guess is most of the people involved had a certain
idea about show-business. Of the three main actresses only Patty Duke manages
to be convincing - but in all fairness, she had the meatiest, the only meaty
role in the movie - while Sharon Tate tries to be any bit as talentless as the
character she plays, & Barbara Parkins makes even Mary Tyler Moore (who
played a rather similar character in her self-named tv-series) look like an
actress. The schmaltzy John Williams-score does also make every effort to drag
the movie down - though in all fairness, it isn't even half as bad as the
atrocities he wrote later in his career, for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas,
among others.
review © by Mike Haberfelner
... and a second opinion by Sam Jones from DVD is Go ...
During the extra features on the Cinema Reserve special edition
of Valley of the Dolls, one of the hacks dragged in to hype this rather fine
exercise in big budget lunacy states that the definition of a camp movie is one
that doesn't set out to be over the top, garish or silly. A camp movie should
never be self-conscious and it certainly shouldn't wink at the audience and
laugh at itself.
So when respected Hollywood journeyman Mark Robson (Peyton Place) was approached
to direct the best selling novel by failed actress and Broadway gossip hound
Jacqueline Susann, he didn't intend his movie to be reviled by critic or
retrospectively adored by lovers of car crash cinema.
The author had written a scandalous novel on many levels. For a start, the
combination of independent career girls, hedonism, drugs and sex, meant that
even though Susann could have written convincing prose with a gun to her head,
the book was impossible to put down in an era when you just didn't find these
kind of subject matters dealt with in popular fiction.
Secondly, many of the larger than life characters in the book were purported to
be based on real people who worked in theatre and movies. The thinly veiled
representations of the scheming, back biting and bitchy denizens of showbiz must
have sent shockwaves through the entertainment business when the book smashed
sales records to be become one of the best selling publications of all time.
It's certainly true that, in the same way that, for better or worse, cinema was
never the same after Jaws ushered in the age of the blockbuster, so Valley of
the Dolls created a new precedent for writers, allowing the kind of easy-to-read
sex and scandal fiction so beloved of authors like Jackie Collins to flourish.
The film was set to be the great white hope of the industry for that year, with
a large budget and big stars. Judy Garland was tested for the role but, broken
by the same dangerous lifestyle and fickle fortunes contained in the book, had
to leave the production, to be replaced by the amazing Susan Hayward. Hayward
had starred in the Oscar winning tale of a women on death row, I Want To Live,
and her unique brand of bombastic melodrama gives Dolls a touch of class, even
if she does chew the scenery during most of her screen time.
Adding to the bizarre mix is Sharon Tate, a poor actress playing a girl who
can't act in a masterstroke of appropriate casting. An attractive presence
throughout the picture, her character's life spirals into misery, suicidal
depression and roles in French art films (for art please read porn),
Tate also lends the film a dark edge, as she was famously slain by the Manson
Family, in a act of violence that helped to end the utopian dreams of the baby
boomer generation.
Central to the film is Neely, a nice girl who is twisted by the machinery of
fame. The dolls of the title refer to slang for prescribed medication and Neely
(played by the completely OTT Patty Duke) becomes totally hooked. Alienating her
friends and colleagues, her descent into addiction and madness is a joy to
behold.
The final major role went to Barbara Parkins, who had worked with the director
previously on Peyton Place. She plays wholesome if naive country girl Anne
Welles and she holds the other characters together when their lives go horribly
awry, despite having her own issues to deal with. Of all the roles in the film,
hers is the only character who has a hope of surviving the insanity.
Because Valley of the Dolls is all about insanity. The style of the film is
weirdly feral, encompassing good old fashioned Hollywood style and the glamour
of films like Breakfast at Tiffanys while throwing in bizarre psyched out
montages, giddily insane lighting and a kind of simmering melodramatic tension
that boils over in full blown dementia through the running time.
This is one of the defining films of the 1960s. It's not the greatest film of
the era from the point of view of getting included in any mainstream critics
list, but as a document of how Hollywood was trying to court the young, an
example of woman asserting independence on screen (even if their dreams are
crushed later on...) and as a barometer of the popular tastes of the time it's
priceless.
A glorious masterpiece of camp cinema.
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