VALLEY OF THE DOLLS 1967
33%
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Dorothy Kingsley and Helen Deutsch
Starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Sharon Tate, Paul Burke, Lee Grant, Susan Hayward
Synopsis
Three women take different paths to the entertainment industry in the mid-1960s, but an air of drugs, vanity, and desperation haunts them wherever they go. Each comes to a dramatic realization about the price of fame.
Why We Love It
Before there was John Waters or The Room or Showgirls, there was Valley of the Dolls. By the mid-1960s, women’s power in Hollywood was waning. All those big, bright stars like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Judy Garland (who was fired from Valley and replaced with Susan Hayward) who had buoyed the industry during the studio era had been tossed to the wayside as male-centric stories dominated the box office. Valley of the Dolls was a meta-statement on the disposability of women and also a vehicle for those women to tear down the walls in one last hoorah.
Buried in the camp is one of the more enigmatic performances of Lee Grant, who would go on right after this film to win an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. Here, though, she’s mysterious and manipulative, selling alluringly strange lines like, “At night, all cats are gray,” taking a 1546 John Heywood proverb and turning it into a searing Dorothy Parker takedown.
Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara delivers the biggest performance of the film, goaded on by director Mark Robson, who encouraged over-the-top outbursts rather than more subtle line reads. She snarls and stumbles, hollering at her husband, whom she’s just found cheating on her in a pool. And yet Neely’s narrative is plummy compared to that of Sharon Tate’s Jennifer North, a kind of version of Tate herself who’s naïve and willing to please, ensnared in the drama of more powerful, cunning people. Because this film is supposed to be a cautionary tale, like an after-school special on crack, Jennifer’s fate tends toward the seedier side of things, involving such taboo subjects as porn long before that topic had been touched in the mainstream.
This film is the definition of camp—a serious attempt at drama that moves from horribly awry to terrifically right. And its impact is lasting. Without this monstrously melodramatic adaptation, we might have been deprived of a generation of drag queens inspired by the scenery-chewing female stars who relegate their male counterparts to unmemorable, furniture-in-the-room roles.