Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967); Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)

At long last I have a compact answer to the question "What is the difference between kitsch and camp?": Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) is kitsch and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970) is camp. And if that shakes down yet again to "kitsch is what you like and camp is what I like," then so be it. At least for once I have some mainstream support on my side. Leonard Maltin gave Valley of the Dolls a BOMB rating whereas he awarded Beyond the Valley of the Dolls three (out of four) stars, noting that it was "picked by two prominent critics as one of the 10 best U.S. films 1968–78" (Richard Corliss was one; who was the other?). 

The problem with Valley has nothing to do with whittling down Jacqueline Susann's sweeping novel to a two-hour film. Compression was a huge part of what made the Minnelli/Sirk melodramas of the 1950s so intense. It's that the film plays like a ragtag highlight reel of the novel, the most egregious effect of which the lack of any sense of how the three principals come to be friends. That might have been attractive in a car crash sort of way if only the performances powered us through Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley's jagged screenplay. But Barbara Parkins and Sharon Tate are not bad enough to slot Valley as camp. They're just bland, the film equivalent of garden gnomes and gazing balls. By contrast, Patty Duke is a bit too good. Sure, no actress alive could deliver some of her riper lines with any credibility. But she gives the impression of conveying the interiority of a character rather than a tantalizing (and necessary) exteriority, the hallmark of camp. 

Camp requires a vibratory intelligence behind the proceedings, a force placing everything in quotes from a distance. There is no such intelligence behind Valley, least of all Mark Robson, a director so undistinguished that Andrew Sarris neglected to afford him an entry in The American Cinema. (His two greatest films, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, both 1943, reflect the hand of producer Val Lewton more than Robson.) The thing just sits there, authorless and waiting to validate your straight-and-narrow life path. Valley of the Dolls is less a showbiz exposé than a proto-Hallmark Christmas movie. It rewarded the Silent Majority for moving out of the big bad cities and as such, is most useful as an always welcome reminder that there was no Great Consensus in the 1960s (or any other era, for that matter). (Did anyone involved know, or care, that Sgt. Pepper was released five months prior?)

I desperately want to give Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a full A. But the brutal fact is that the film sags in the middle, most drearily in the protracted scene where Kelly (Dolly Read) seduces Porter Hall (Duncan McLeod). The first forty minutes, though, are beyond indeed, an A+ sugar-high masterpiece. In a film with room for the outsized personality of trans teen tycoon Z-Man/Superwoman (John LaZar), the great camp performance here comes courtesy of the incredible Edy Williams as porn star Ashley St. Ives. With her gargantuan slash of a mouth and her sultry aphorisms, she is pure externality, a sentient Id who emphasizes a line like "you're a lousy lay" with life-affirming unnaturalness. 

And oh what lines! I couldn't even hazard a favorite. Roger Ebert's screenplay reads like a Mad Lib with hip slang like "freak" and "happening" and "dig" wedged into each sentence. Russ Meyer's typical quick cutting heightens the hyperactivity. And there are no depths to uncover. Instead, we get Mama Lion Lynn Carey singing like a truck driver for the slight Dolly Read as leader of the Carrie Nations rock trio. There's also better bad music too. Even the version of Dionne Warwick's "Theme from Valley of the Dolls" included in Valley is an echoey horror.

And yet, for all Beyond's camp vitesse, there's one moment that puts the brakes on the film's rhythm and renders it more complex. Z-Man is spouting off his florid Bardisms to the Carrie Nations after a blockbuster performance. Each one buys into his babble until he gets to Casey (Cynthia Myers) who simply stares back at him unimpressed. And for a second, we get a glimpse of what Z-Man is like after he takes a bow and retreats to his bedroom mirror, a refraction that fills him with guilt and dysphoria. We glimpse the precondition of camp as a survival technique, a moment not amenable to camp snickering. Or kitsch validation, for that matter.

Valley of the Dolls: C

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: A-minus