Viking Night: Valley of the Dolls
By Bruce Hall
April 22, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It is, quite simply, a gift. Valley of the Dolls is definitely the kind of movie that never stops giving, and it’s also a film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's runaway hit novel of the same name. It tells the story of three girls, lifelong friends who struggle to navigate the male dominated entertainment industry, and how their mutual dependence on drugs to offset that challenge affects each of them. "Dolls" is a slang term for pills, and I'm going to assume that "valley" refers to the point where you wake up in a dumpster, covered with puke and allegorically bellowing the names of everyone you've ever wronged. The story tries to cover a lot of ground, philosophical and otherwise. But the ride is, shall we say….uneven.
Anne Wells (Barbara Parkins) is an ambitious "career girl" whose sophistication and elegance tend to open doors in unanticipated ways. She lands a job with an entertainment lawyer, setting her up in the same circle as Neely O'Hara (Patty Duke), a plucky Broadway singer with designs on super stardom. The girls befriend Jennifer North (Sharon Tate), a good natured chorus girl whose relative lack of talent is offset by her generous spirit, and I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she's incredibly hot. After an initial series of career misfires, Ann leaves her office job for the runway, becoming a successful model almost overnight. Neely turns her own career lemons into lemonade and becomes an international superstar. And Jennifer hooks up with an equally ditzy lounge singer who would be the next Frank Sinatra, and they love each other in the way only two slightly simple people can.
At the time, Parkins was a popular television star (think Alison Brie on a scale of one to Oprah), Patty Duke was America’s Oscar Winning Sweetheart, and Sharon Tate was the It Girl everyone was talking about. Getting people into theaters to see them together, in the film version of the most popular novel in the world was the easy part. Valley of the Dolls made a boatload of money at the box office, but everyone also agreed that it was terrible and they hated it.
The hard part is that Valley of the Dolls was supposed to be very much a drama, perhaps the Trainspotting or Midnight Cowboy of its time. Instead, thanks to so many people being in over their heads in so many ways, it ends up being perhaps the best comedy of 1967. Even if you haven’t read the book, it’s not hard to identify the themes. A girl can make it but it’s still a man’s world, and it’s still a tough slog for women in show business. Drugs are a convenient way to grease the rails, as long as you don’t mind ending up in that dumpster I mentioned.
But Valley of the Dolls feels, from top to bottom, like the creation of people who’ve never created anything before. Dionne Warwick’s theme song, with its clunky meandering lyrics and unpleasant melody haunts the soundtrack throughout the entire movie. It’s like a horror film where the hook is the Creepy Dead Girl that sings “Ring Around the Rosie” from the shadows, her creepy, desiccated falsetto chilling your blood solid. The dialogue sounds like it was written by people who’ve never spoken to other people before. Characters make foolish, spontaneous decisions that seem gratuitous and artificial. The musical numbers in the film, and the characters’ performance of them, are so horrifically terrible that you find yourself awkwardly cheering it on, like a badly overproduced Special Olympics event.
Andre and Dory Previn are Academy Award winning composers, but the material they created for this movie is nothing of the sort. The songs are competently written but I’m assuming the lyrics were written by the cinematographer. At the very least I would expect a good show tune to rhyme, if of course there WERE any good show tunes (zing!). The best part is when the characters are all gushing about how one thing or another is the greatest performance they’ve ever seen in their lives, and you’re sitting there thinking: “No it’s not.”
In some scenes, actors deliver awkwardly written dialogue with tremendous conviction, and then there are the scenes where the actors look as lost as the words. Maybe it’s because the way the film is edited and structured, it’s impossible to get a sense of how much time has passed from scene to scene. The story seems to cover a couple of decades but nobody ever visually ages, and it’s damn near impossible to distinguish one geographic location from another.
Mark Robson was an accomplished director, but here I genuinely wonder if he was even on set most of the time. Everything about this film is disastrously inadequate, and no one involved is beyond reproach. Each of the girls has a final, climactic scene that is meant to be poignant or thought provoking, but instead feels laughably absurd (Patty Duke's swan song can only be described as "Shatneresque" in scale).
Yes, this movie is bad. But I wouldn't be able to describe it with such loving detail if it hadn't entertained me on some level. Valley of the Dolls is so bad it's actually funny, and if that's all a movie does for you - whether it means to or not - it is, quite simply, a gift.