“Goddamned disgrace, Buck. Man can’t take his family to the movies without seeing some kind of filth!” – Dialogue from “Myra Breckinridge” (1970)
There’s a scene about midway through Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970) in which our heroine Kelly Mac Namara (Dolly Read) tries to show Porter Hall (Duncan McLeod), an aging, sleazy attorney, how to get high. It comes in the midst of attempted seduction, so the old, square man tries to play it cool, chuckling, “Of course I know what it is” as she hands him a pipe – which he proceeds to puff like a tobacco pipe. Kelly, patiently, walks him through how to inhale properly: “Hold it here. That’s it. Now blow it out. Let me show you.” But he continues, cluelessly, to screw it up.
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In a way, that scene is a metaphor for the entire movie – for, in fact, an entire mini-cycle of movies rushed into production by the crumbling studios after the astonishing commercial success of “Easy Rider.” The majors, already weakened by the Supreme Court-mandated divestment of their theatrical properties and the rising ubiquity of television, were watching expensive but ostensibly sure-fire would-be blockbusters bleed money left and right.
Twentieth Century Fox was in particularly rough shape. Its 1965 release of “The Sound of Music” was an unqualified smash, toppling box office records and winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, but the studio spent the following half-decade trying and failing to replicate that success with a series of lumbering, oversized musical flops, including “Doctor Dolittle,” “Star!”, and “Hello, Dolly!” Meanwhile, the 1969 release of “Easy Rider” (and similarly edgy hits like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Midnight Cowboy” before it) seemed to point toward a new formula for success: low-budget, youth-oriented pictures, taking advantage of the leniency in subject matter permitted by the new movie ratings system.
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So Fox made a play for that audience. In 1969, Daryl Zanuck, then the studio’s chairman and CEO, appointed his son, Richard (then 35-years-old – a baby, by industry standards), as president. A couple of potential youth hits were already in the pipeline: George Roy Hill’s hip Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and Robert Altman’s war satire “M*A*S*H.” But the younger Zanuck wanted to go even harder. His two big X-rated swings, an in-name-only sequel to Fox’s soapy 1967 hit “Valley of the Dolls” and an adaptation of Gore Vidal’s satirical novel “Myra Breckinridge,” landed in theaters within a week of each other in June of 1970, fifty years ago.
It did not go well.
“Dolls” is directed by Russ Meyer, and the idea of Meyer making a studio picture was wild, to begin with. He’d made his name in the late-‘50s and early-‘60s with a series of “nudie cutie” movies – goofy, low-budget comedies like “The Immoral Mr. Teas,” which existed primarily to leer at naked girls. As the decade continued, he perfected an extravagant, violent, slyly satirical style in independent hits like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen”; the latter film, released in 1968, was immensely profitable, and that return on investment was likely what caught Zanuck’s attention.
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Though the X rating was not yet the mark of pornography (and the kiss of death for mainstream success) that it would become – “Midnight Cowboy” won the Best Picture Oscar in spite of the rating – Fox was hoping for a hard R. So the sex in “Beyond the Valley” is decidedly softcore (softer than “Vixen,” for example, though the MPAA would ultimately give “Dolls” an X anyway). But in every other respect, it is pure, uncut Meyer, filled with broadly drawn stereotypes, wild mise-en-scène, and overcooked story twists: tears, drugs, suicide, swapping, same-sex couplings, pregnancies, orgies, murders, the works.
His screenplay, which replicated and satirized the bare essentials of the original film and the Jacqueline Susann novel it was based on, was penned by one Roger Ebert, who had championed Meyer’s ‘60s films and took a five-week leave of absence from the Chicago Sun-Times to collaborate with Meyer on the script. Oddly, a prominent movie critic also figured into “Myra Breckinridge”; British director Michael Sarne cast New York critic and celebrity profiler Rex Reed as Myron Breckinridge, who begins the film in a Copenhagen operating room for the sex change operation that will transform him into Myra (Raquel Welch).
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Beyond their shared studio, release dates, and ratings, “Beyond” and “Myra” share an awareness of their moment, and, to some extent, the silliness of their very existence. “Beyond’s” party scenes are a hit-and-run parody of the entire L.A. feel-good hippie-influenced “scene” (“This is hardly my idea of a civilized good time,” sneers Porter), hosted by a vamping impresario known as “Z-Man,” whom Ebert said was based on Phil Spector, though neither he nor Meyer had ever met the notorious producer (an ironic inspiration, considering the character’s eventual homicidal impulses). The last of these sequences is a hazy Beverly Hills drug orgy that turns into a mass murder – the film, bear in mind, was in theaters less than a year after the Manson murders.
“Myra” also skewers the Hollywood scene, and not just with similarly hedonistic party scenes. Much of the action centers on a screen acting school filled with touchy-feely workshops, run by “Buck Loner,” who is played by John Huston as a relic, out of step and clueless. But Myra herself bad-mouths the “group therapy” approach (of actors like “Cowboy’s” Dustin Hoffman and “Easy Rider’s” Jack Nicholson), expressing her preference for pictures of Hollywood’s golden age, to which an instructor objects, “There’s not a moment of real truth in those old movies!” But director Sarne seems to disagree; throughout the film, he drops in snippets of old movies from the Fox library as ironic counterpoint.
And that refusal to turn their backs on Hollywood conventions may have been what doomed these films, at least to their contemporary, youthful target audience. Meyer was, in many ways, a perfect filmmaker to bridge this generation gap; aside from the copious nudity and hyper-caffeinated editing, he was a fairly old-fashioned filmmaker, embracing ancient montage techniques and baroque dialogue, encouraging performative, presentational acting, and embracing Sirk-style melodrama with an enthusiasm that rivals Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes. The key, however, is that with Meyers it feels like reappropriation; “Myra,” on the other hand, just feels out of touch, billing Welch third under both Huston and Mae West (making her first film appearance since the 1930s), who slows the picture to a crawl with her creaky double-entendres and unfortunate musical interludes.
So some disconnection was inevitable. Film production moves so slowly that any attempt to engage with young ticket buyers almost inherently comes off like the “How do you do, fellow kids” meme, but the timing wasn’t the only issue here. Unlike “Easy Rider,” which (at least to a point) casts its protagonists as sympathetic heroes, Meyer and Ebert are mocking everyone (and everything) in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” And though it’s satirical in itself, it’s hard to imagine audiences in the summer of ’70 thinking much of the turgid, explicit, message-explaining closing voiceover and the frankly conservative conclusion: a triple heterosexual wedding, and a big happily ever after, while the story’s queer “sinners” have been duly punished (Will Hays would’ve approved). The biases of “Myra” are even more pointed – the young students of the acting school are seen as a bunch of low-IQ doofuses, “poppin’ pills and smokin’ grass,” as West puts it, and our heroine appraises them thus: “What you have assembled here are the national dregs, the misfits and erotics – in short, the fuck-ups of our culture!”
Decades later, Ebert wrote that “Beyond the Valley” “was made at a time when the studio’s own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.” But that hands-off approach didn’t last long; according to the history “Twentieth Century Fox: A Century of Entertainment,” the elder Zanuck was “disturbed at the direction his son was taking the company with films like ‘Myra Breckinridge.’” (Meyers, perhaps sensing the resistance to come, slyly uses the iconic Fox fanfare as the music cue for a decapitation late in the movie.) “Beyond” turned a profit, but both films garnered vicious reviews that June of 1970, and at the end of the year, the younger Zanuck resigned – or was pushed out by his father, depending on which story you choose to believe – from his post at Fox.
“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” eventually found an appreciative audience among connoisseurs of cult cinema, finally landing the ultimate imprimatur of motion picture respectability, a Criterion Collection release, in 2016. “Myra” never found that audience, and for good reason; a couple of inspired moments aside, it just doesn’t work, and the flop sweat of Sarne (who would never direct again in the States) is palpable.
At the end of that generation gap weed-smoking sequence in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” Kelly seductively gets into “something more comfortable” and invites Porter Hall into her bed. He joins her, with some apprehension; she discovers, unsurprisingly, that he is unable to perform. This, too, seems an appropriate conclusion to the film’s accidental dramatization of Twentieth Century Fox’s brief flirtation with dirty movies.