Sometimes you have to watch a movie simply in order to contextualize one of its most famous lines. I have known people who think that “We don’t need no steenking badges” comes from Mel Brooks’ History of the World—without knowing that Brooks was alluding to Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But at least they were on the trail of the quotation. I lived the first thirty years of my life without having any clue concerning the origin of “You know how bitchy fags can be!”

It used to be that when someone like Scott Thompson (of The Kids in the Hall) lisped the line while decked out as a barroom diva, I was locked outside of the referential laughter. I didn’t see what was so funny about the line. And now that I know where it comes from, I still don’t see what’s funny about it. But I guess I always like to know what people are laughing at just to be sure they’re not laughing at me. Watching Valley of the Dolls is one method of reassuring yourself that you aren’t the most laughable person in the history of humanity. At your absolute shallowest and most melodramatic, you have never been anywhere near as offensive to good taste as Patty Duke’s portrayal of Neely O’Hara.

If the chief distinction between camp and kitsch is the difference between artists who intend to embarrass themselves and those who embarrass themselves unintentionally, then I would have to place Valley of the Dolls into the kitsch category. Some of the performers seem to be aware of themselves as sabotaging the film in which they appear; but most of them appear to think that bad performances are key to the artistic integrity of the movie.

I think that Patty Duke expects us to believe in Neely O’Hara’s brattiness; I think she thinks such brattiness is appropriate for her character. And considering the characters that surround her, I’m not sure that she’s wrong. I think the overacting is genuinely attributable to a character who has no sense of being over-the-top (rather than to an actress who does).

Still, since most viewers tend to categorize Valley of the Dolls as ‘camp,’ I’ll go along for the ride. Admittedly, it is rather difficult to make the case that anyone could ever have taken the cheesy lounge songs that litter the film even the slightest bit seriously. And I suppose director Mark Robson had to expect us to laugh when a hospitalized character afflicted with Huntingdon’s disease is roused from catatonia by the familiarity of a frightfully bad lounge number that he used to perform, only to relapse as soon as the song is over.

Suppose for a moment that you had been comatose for years and were allowed to become conscious again for only three minutes or so. Now suppose that you spent that three-minute burst of lucidity listening to a Wayne Newton song. If Satan and Sartre put their heads together, I’m not sure that they could come up with a more compelling depiction of hell.

Not having read the book, I can only say that the film version of Valley of the Dolls appears to be about three women who discover that they don’t want the things they think they want. Jennifer North (Sharon Tate, who delivers the famous line discussed above) is a blond beauty who thinks that she wants to marry lounge singer Tony Polar. Shortly after she gets her wish, however, she discovers that he is hereditarily doomed by Huntingdon’s Disease. She has to start working in French art films (nudies) in order to pay the costs of his hospitalization. One can imagine the sexually repressed spin that the National Enquirer would put on her peculiar plight: “How My Desire to Be a Good Wife Drove Me to Pornography.”

Neely O’Hara is a singer who wants fame and fortune, but who is driven by her career to seek solace in the very drugs that will deaden her to her own success. Predictably, she ends up alone—having alienated all of the men who ever loved her along with the women who once considered themselves her friends. The last man to desert her is Lyon Burke (Paul Burke), who seems to be the only thing that Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) has ever wanted. When Lyon returns to Anne, however, she finds herself unable to take him back. He has rejected her too many times, and now that he is sure he wants Anne, she is no longer certain that she wants him.

I’m not really sure why movies like this get made, since there’s already an abundance of the same sort of thing on television and in the tabloids. But I suspect the appeal has something to do with the lavishness that Hollywood can bring to trash—only I never quite saw the lavishness in Valley of the Dolls that everyone talks about. There’s a scene in which an actor portraying a director within the film complains about a $600 head dress, but it doesn’t look like it cost any $600 to me.

Valley of the Dolls isn’t very good as a good film. But more importantly, it’s not remarkably bad as a bad film. All my life I’ve heard how deliciously awful this flick is, but I really didn’t see what made it more annoying as a soap opera than The Lion in Winter or From Here to Eternity. I really wouldn’t say that it’s nearly bad enough to rival such truly awful masterpieces as Glen or Glenda or (my personal favorite of rotten cinema) The Day the World Ended.

I recommend it only because I think it’s important for people to see first hand how films such as Valley of the Dolls fail to live up to their reputations. Valley of the Dolls isn’t nearly as bad as bad films need to be in order to captivate their audiences. It’s really no worse than the average Hollywood release. Really, if we can’t hold ourselves to higher standards of kitsch and camp than this, what will become of us?





Recommended: Yes