When I was in junior high school, one or more paperback copies of what had been a mega-big best-selling trashy novel, Valley of the Dolls, was being passed around by the most "in"/popular girls in the class. Perhaps the girls shared steamy parts with the boys they were leading on or satisfying, but no boy, not even the proto-gay ones would have been caught dead with the book.

I think I saw the movie version later on tv and thought it must have been censored. 'cause there was no steam at all. It may be that some of the movie within a movie with Sharon Tate naked in a Parisian bed were cut on network tv during the 1970s, but I now know that there are no sex scenes in the whole movie and that Tate's French movie scenes are nude but unerotic. There is alsi a man and a woman in a swimming pool with their togs left at the side of the pool, but only their heads are visible above the water. They could have been wearing wetsuits. Similarly, in Patty Duke's bathing scene, only her head is sticking out of a canvas cover over the bathtub.

There is not a moment of eroticism at all on view in the whole movie. For that matter, the "dolls" (uppers and downers) are invisible for the first half of the movie, except under the opening credits. BTW, the red, blue, and yellow capsules emptying their contents during the opening credits provide the visually most interesting part of the movie until a red wig refuses to be flushed down a toilet and is flung out of the stall. (The only scene I remembered from the telecast of the movie was Patty Duke snatching the wig off the white-haired Susan Hayward and trying to flush it down the toilet. The contest, I now realize, is a party for the Broadway star played by Hayward that is crashed by the Judy Garland character played by Duke who is trying to make a comeback.)

What is the movie about? Although I stayed awake through its more than two hours of running time ("crawling time"?), I'm not at all sure. Certainly not sex. There's not even much sexual innuendo. Maybe "Drugs are bad"? To some extent the supposedly talented singer played by Patty Duke is undone by alternating barbiturates and metamphetamine, and I guess one might think that the drugs turn her into a monster, though it seems to me that success goes to her addled head. Pills (the title's "dolls") do not destroy the Marilyn Monroe character played by Sharon Tate or the proper New Englander who survives association with Madison Avenue, Broadway ,and Hollywood to return to the clean New England snow (Barbara Parkins, a tv star at the time and the sometimes narrator of the movie and presumptive Jacqueline Sussan character, though the author herself appears in the movie as a reporter).

Maybe the point is supposed to be that women don't know what they want and are not satisfied when they get it? Well, the movie focuses on three young women, two of whom attain great success and do not thereby achieve happiness. There are men in their lives, but what the men want is unclear. One has a measure of success and is felled by Huntington's disease. (He was what the least commercially successful of the three young women wanted and got.) The moral of the movie is that women should not leave home and aspire to show business success. Small-town marriages to men of no aspiration should be enough for them...

As I said, I remembered the wig being snatched off. The other part of the movie I remembered was the theme song, sung by Dionne Warwick, a sort of dreamy soulless song the most recurrent phrase of which is "Gotta get off" (this merry-go-round, etc.; the other kind of "getting off" remains an unmet need so far as one can tell from what appears on the screen). The song is not really "catchy," but it's hard to get out of mind.

This is not a problem for the other songs supplied by Dorry and Andre Previn. They are leaden. Not that Susan Hayward, Patty Duke, and Tony Scotti are vocal stylists with particular gifts selling songs, but the problem is more the dull songs (and inept production numbers) than the performers.

The acting performances are also disappointing. None of the three young women has a trace of the charisma. Knowing Sharon Tate's fate, it's tempting to read more wistfulenss into her "performance" than is actually there on the screen. She is unable to stand up to her mother in recurrent phone calls or to the French producer-director (based on Roger Vadim?). Patty Duke desperately overacts but fails to register any credible human emotions, just as she is unconvincing as a singer with a Great Talent. Barbara Parkins and the men are empty vessels. The tough survivor part is mostly a cliche, but Susan Hayward was always good at sensing and eliminating potential female competition and manages to sound plausible in her final scene analyzing Neely (Duke). And they may sound plausible because they are like those in other movies rather than any offscreen reality.

For trashy show-biz-centered movies, "Valley of the Dolls" is not as bad as "Two Weeks in Another Town" or "Myra Beckenridge." It in the league (though vying for last place) of "The Barefoot Contessa, "Inside Daisy Clover," "The Oscar," and the Streisand "A Star Is Born"; a cut or more below "The Bad and the Beautiful," "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" "Mommie Dearest" and "The Carpetbaggers"; far inferior to "Bombshell," "The Player," "Ed Wood" or the Garland/Cukor version of "A Star Is Born." (I might have given the movie two stars, but feel a duty to counteract the three five-star ratings it has here,)

And, no, "Valley of the Dolls" is not "camp." "Myra Beckenridge" arguably is, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" reputedly is. "Valley of the Dolls" did not even attain its apparent ambition to provide entertaining and glamorous vulgarity.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age