Critics reviews

Cast with frequently nude Playboy playmates and veterans of Mr. Meyer's earlier films, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is a relic of Fox's most delirious period... Mr. Meyer's grand finale mixes bloody mayhem with saccharine bromides, but the film's most outré aspect is its innocence. With its flat lighting; garish colors; and arch, dated slang, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is beyond self-parody, a cartoon of a cartoon.

The lip-smacking tastelessness and/or irresponsibility of ostensibly exploiting real-life tragedy for a jokey melodrama parody is arguably ameliorated by the film's ingenuousness. This is a charitable reading, obviously. But Meyer's earlier pictures can be seen as examples of kidding on the square.

Despite period details that were already behind-the-curve when the movie came out (Hollywood is always late to the party when it panders to youth culture) and a certain moralistic undertone characteristic of Meyer, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is still a gas, thanks mainly to its heedless energy and its "are they kidding or not?" tone.

One might be inclined to label the film dementedly schizophrenic rather than purely demented were it not for its filmmakers' wild-ass winks to being inside the gates of hell. If cueing 20th Century Fox's logo theme during a character's decapitation isn't a dead giveaway, nothing ever could be.

As bad as it is good, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls challenged growing unease with the Hollywood elites by indulging in an absurd escalation of vice while lampooning the self-important image the industry had of itself.

Ebert's screenplay is a tour de force of multi-genre mockery, moving nimbly from golden age banter ("you have an unending capacity for counterfeit astonishment") to hippie slang ("this is my happening and it freaks me out!") to Elizabethan soliloquy ("look there, an island of tranquility in this sea of revelry").

Asked to create a follow-up for Mark Robson's famously awful, enormously successful 1967 hit Valley of the Dolls, adapted from Jacqueline Susann's bestseller, Meyer and Ebert transformed the project into their own freewheeling satire on both the Hollywood scene, which had been infected by the counterculture but still offered excess par excellence, and the Hollywood product itself.

Both Dolls movies are sexually reactionary movies in the way they hand over the reigns to the opposite sex (Susann to fags like Ted Casablanca, Meyer and Ebert to the collective areola). But at least in Beyond everyone's having a good time. As his overactive jump cuts prove, Meyer directs films as though he's perpetually on the cusp of a fantastic orgasm.

The tug between the nudge-nudge of the dialogue and the large-eyed enthusiasm of the delivery makes Beyond a real pill, one that was rudely dismissed by critics as garbage. But it's fabulous, teddy bear—a psychedelic wow that serves up the free love, plunging necklines, androgynous boys, and lusty lezzies of the era with a narcotized abandon.

No amount of tight-assed critical analysis can negate the film's riotously campy set pieces, including a groovy party featuring Strawberry Alarm Clock as the house band and a frenetic action climax in which the paraplegic hero struggles to get into his wheelchair after being left behind in the car. As Read's character says at one point, in a scene like this, you get a contact high.

It's quite funny at times, and the expert direction is never less than vigorous, though in retrospect it seems to have marked the end of Meyer's most appealing period—his comic spirit was more expansive before he learned the word "camp."

With his first movie for a major studio, Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and thrills.