Double Feature #5: 'Lord

Love A Duck'/'Beyond the

Valley of the Dolls'

 

Tonight's double feature boasts two of the funniest, loopiest, most scathing satires of 60's culture and the Hollywood 'scene' to ever escape from the vaults of major studios. Both feature beautiful women willing to pay whatever cost fame demands, the sociopathic men willing to 'help' them achieve their dreams, and lots of cool dancing and far-out music.

 

Lord Love A Duck (1966) is legendary writer George Axelrod's only stint in the director's chair, having earned the shot by penning a series of highly successful plays and screenplays (The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Manchurian Candidate, How to Murder Your Wife). Having witnessed first-hand the bizarre world surrounding Marilyn Monroe, and the machinery it took to make and keep her a movie star, Axelrod wrote the story of Barbara Ann Greene - a simple high school girl whose desires escalate from popularity, to a husband, to movie stardom (which very definitely means NOT having a husband). Alan 'Mollymauk' Musgrave is the young man willing to do whatever it takes to see Barbara Ann gets what she wants. At whatever cost to them both.

 

Any attempt to provide a plot synopsis for Lord Love A Duck would just make me sound like a raving lunatic. To say it's all over the map would be both accurate and inaccurate - it's reconnoitering so much new territory that it's run off the edges of the old map and is drawing new maps as it goes. In its 105-minute running time it manages to skewer high school movies, beach party movies, A Star is Born-style Hollywood mythmaking, religion, marriage, the middle class vs. the lower class, divorce, Svengalism, mothers-in-law, health food, modern education and murder. And I'm probably missing a few things. The surrealism of the script is matched by the surrealism of the direction - beach party scenes are deliberately shot in a barren, artificial soundstage, and the scene where Barbara Ann seduces her guilt-ridden father for a rainbow of Cashmere sweaters is shot with what can only be described as an antagonistic ferocity. The ads claimed, "This motion picture is an act of pure aggression." That may be the most accurate tag line to ever come out of a Hollywood marketing department.

 

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) is, if anything, even MORE aggressive. Gleefully so. 20th Century Fox was coming off a string of big budget flops that left the studio reeling. Filmmaker Russ Meyer had spent the last ten years cranking out big hits ('hits' - I said 'hits') that cost next to nothing and raked in millions. That they were exploitation films featuring naked women with huge breasts didn't phase Fox - they had just the project: A sequel to the smash hit Valley of the Dolls. Feeling like a kid in a candy store, Meyer famously recruited Roger Ebert to write the screenplay - based on certain shared enthusiasms - and proceeded to cast every well-endowed actress in town. God bless him.

 

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls tells the story of the Carrie Nations, an all-female rock band who come to Hollywood just in time to see the swingin' 60's self-destruct. Like Lord Love A Duck, Beyond is a satire that takes aim at multiple and constantly changing targets: Hollywood, the music industry, swingers, the 'establishment,' squares, soap operas, gold diggers, star fuckers, druggies, homosexuals, transsexuality and ritualistic murder. That the movie ends with a bloody killing spree in a swanky Hollywood pad just one year after the Manson murders shocked the nation speaks to the prescience of Ebert and Meyer. The killings in the film inspire the characters (that live) to pursue more 'straight' and conventional lives - just as the Tate/LaBianca killings are often cited as the death knell of the rebellious 60's.

 

Both films use the templates of established genres to frame their stories. Beyond uses the show-biz tale of the small-town girl hitting it big and losing her soul, while Duck is a mix of 50's and 60's high school and beach party movies, mixed with...  the show-biz tale of the small-town girl hitting it big and losing her soul. Each film also features an unhinged Svengali character willing to help our heroine get everything she desires. In fact, both films let us know these Svengalis are unhinged from the opening frames. They each begin in media res, as Duck's Alan (Roddy McDowall) and Beyond's Z-man Barzel (John LaZar) race around in the midst or immediate aftermath of a killing spree. There's no mystery about whether things will go bad - the only mystery is how. It creates a sense of dread and suspense that permeates both films, even at the height of their satiric zaniness.

 

Each film is perfectly cast. In Duck, Roddy McDowall plays against type as Alan, making a character whose dark motivations are never entirely clear seem like the only normal, sensible person in the film. Tuesday Weld brings every bit of her star power to Barbara Ann, making the transition from a sweet, naive teen to a woman willing to knock off her husband believable and tragic. The supporting roles are just as impressive, with Harvey Korman, Ruth Gordon and Max Showalter providing hilarious turns while Lola Albright breaks your heart as Barbara Ann's divorced cocktail waitress mother. Beyond may not boast such established star power, but Meyer uses his actors to their full potential. Dolly Read is beautiful and spirited as Kelly MacNamara, while Cynthia Myers radiates vulnerability as her bandmate Casey Anderson. John LaZar plays Z-Man Barzel with a quick-witted intelligence that's a marvel to behold. Given the most outrageous lines and deeds in the whole over-the-top film, he manages to pull them off with style. I mean, he makes the line, "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance" work. Top THAT. (Oh, and Edy Williams plays a man-eating, attention-seeking porn star. Don't tell me Russ Meyer wasn't a genius.)

 

While both films enjoy a healthy cult following, audiences seem to laugh WITH Lord Love A Duck, while laughing AT Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This is, I think, unfair. Because of the filmmakers involved, and the flamboyant campiness of the style and the material, there's the attitude that Beyond is a bad movie. As if Meyer and Ebert and their co-conspirators were unaware of what