It is one of the mysterious lacunae in my film education that I have never seen Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the legendary collaboration between critic Roger Ebert and exploitation auteur Russ Meyer, boob men with a mission. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with Meyer's oeuvre. I saw Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! in college, and seem to recall garish colors that reeked of dumb virility, and a spirited session on a pool table. Mudhoney, saw that too, along with a number of Meyer films that reminded me of the sort of movies Al Capp might have made if he could have shown L'il Abner and Daisy Mae rocking the cabin trailer. But Later Meyer I never gravitated to, the delirium of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls something I had to take on dubious faith. Now I have no excuse for not remedying my ignorance, as Fox Home Video has honored this cultwork with a lavish double-DVD release with extensive commentary from Ebert. It would be the perfect Father's Day gift, if Father's Day wasn't already over. In a tour de force appreciation, Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule pays homage to the film's bravura palette and neo-Eisensteinian editing:
"The transfer rendered for this release by Fox Home Video is superlative--the colors pop off the screen and overwhelm you with their audacity just the way they're supposed to, courtesy of cinematography by the usually workmanlike and stodgy Fred Koenekamp, fresh off of Patton ( !!! ), with an occasional assist from former wartime photographer Meyer himself. And if you watch any part of the movie, or all of it, with the sound off--either to listen to one of the two commentary tracks included on the main feature, or to watch the French subtitles or English SDH titles--Meyer's fairly radical editing techniques become more apparent and appreciable. For instance, during the movie's first big Hollywood party set piece (the one in which Z-Man delightedly exclaims, to no one in particular, 'This is my scene, and it's freaking me out!'), you might not notice, underneath the mad cacophony of squealing, shouting partygoers, the only slightly exaggerated fashions, and the driving beat of the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the razor-sharp, insistent, almost metronomic montage that Meyer uses to carve the scene up into strobe-light flashes of overwhelming experience, mirroring the disorientation that the Carrie Nations are themselves experiencing as they jump into the Hollywood scene for the first time. The whole movie is edited in a similar fashion, and although Meyer necessarily alternates the rhythms for different scenes, no one scene is ever edited in a precisely classical manner--shots never last too long, but they sometimes don't last as long as we expect they might, and the Panavision frame is always subject to the intrusion of an unexpected flurry of evocative, and sometimes not entirely thematically connected imagery which keeps us laughing, but also serves to keep us slightly on edge. Perversely, however, when the movie takes us up to and over that edge during the bizarre horror-film denouement staged at Z-Man's isolated estate, Meyer shifts into a much more rhythmically smooth and familiar style of editing, as if to say the sudden assurances of his style are no assurances at all up against the lurid, unmoored and genuinely shocking horrors that lie in wait for the characters, and for us."
The next time I run into The New Yorker's David Denby in the nabe, I'm going to suggest he and I rent Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and have ourselves a popcorn party. It's part of my reachout program to fellow critics.
