Valley of the Dolls Reviews

If Valley of the Dolls had the courage of its convictions, it would be an even better proto-feminist piece of pop kitsch. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of camp enjoyment to be found here as it covers all of the basics. The tenants of camp cinema are all found here in bits and pieces, things like unintentionally hilarious dramatic moments, overacting, carbon-dating its subject matter, and a clear lack of understanding of some of this material.

Despite racking in obscene piles of money, Valley of the Dolls does distinctly lack a clear directorial vision. Mark Robson was a perfectly competent journeyman director, and he had done fantastic work in his partnership with producer Val Lewton (The 7^th Victim, Isle of the Dead). Shame that the pervading sense of atmosphere and personality that he brought to those films is nowhere to be found here. Valley of the Dolls is trashy entertainment, but if Robson had given over to some better artistic impulses then Dolls could rival its sequel in terms of sheer fuckery and balls-to-the-walls camp ascendancy.   

We have a trio of heroines that all aspire to stardom, but Anne (Barbara Perkins) is our surrogate. Anne is a New Englander, all prim manners and emotional reserve, who befriends Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) and Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) while they try to make it in showbiz. What follows is peaks-and-valleys of insider information, and moments where our heroines reveal the substantial sexism they’re combating. Yet there’s a pervasive sense that the material is somehow afraid (or unable) to encounter the darker, murkier aspects of their individual lives.

Sharon Tate made the lasting impression on me, and in a very good way. Her career was brief, but this was the most substantial and lasting role in it. She’s tremendously vulnerable, and her character’s journey is the one with the most pathos and least amount of kitsch attached. She knows she’s a beautiful girl with limited talent, she knows she’s exploited but has nothing else to offer. Tate is all chic clothing, impossibly glamorous, and deeply effecting by withholding and limiting her performance. Her character’s eventual fate is a moment of genuine seriousness in a movie that up to this point had been pure soap opera.

The only other performance that impresses for positive reasons is Susan Hayward. No surprise, something like this is well within Hayward’s wheelhouse. Overly dramatic soap opera was her forte, and she modulates her performance incredibly well here. The bathroom fight between her and Duke is a humdinger of kitsch, with her wig removal and battered grace something of a moment of brutal truth. Everything else is all ridiculous fun, with Duke’s inability to modulate her performance a real low-light (or is it a highlight?) as her character crashes harder than Icarus.

I do wish the film had mined the feminist fury at the heart of some of this more. The three dolls are at the mercy and sexual pleasure of the men in their lives, with some of them willing to trade on it for favor. The bad behavior on display begins to look more like a well thought-out rebellion. There’s several small tweaks here and there that would improve Valley of the Dolls as camp artifact of the late-60s mod scene. Just sit back and enjoy, because fun is fun, and watching Patty Duke pop brightly colored pills, empty a bottle of Bourbon in her swimming pool, and then have an emotional breakdown in an alleyway is a ton of fun.