VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox, 1967) Criterion Collection

It is difficult, if not entirely impossible, to get behind a movie that fashion mag, Vanity Fair once described as ‘a beloved piece of shit.’ Problematic even more so, when the driving ambition behind it was neither to strive for bad ‘camp’…or even, good camp. And perhaps, most difficult of all when the picture in question is director, Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967) – a movie whose source material – a scintillating ‘tell-all’ by fringe Hollywood ‘insider’, Jaqueline Susann was as much trashed by the cultural mandarins of her time, only to be embraced as no bit of pulp and nonsense gone before or since. To contextualize the popularity of the novel: it debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list where it would remain for 68 weeks, with sales topping out around 30 million copies. Again, for context – this made Valley of the Dolls #3, not just for the year, but in terms of all-time best sellers, preceded only the Bible and the Quran. Even Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind did not pull in those kinds of numbers.  

Retrospectively, one can regard Jaqueline Susann’s prose as sour grapes revisited. It might have stuck in Susann’s craw, despite being pressed to the head of the line in a beauty contest overseen by her father (one of the judges) at the tender age of 18, and, to have landed a screen test, small roles in several Broadway shows, a few C-grade bits in even more disposable movies and, later, television, fame as an actress eluded her. Rumors of a lesbian affair with doomed Fox contract player, Carole Landis aside, Valley of the Dolls has some fairly transparent references to Hollywood royalty of yore; the pill-popping Neely O’Hara, wed to a gay man while climbing the ladder of success, only to succumb to addiction, based on Judy Garland; Marilyn Monroe, the template for Jennifer – a sexpot who does softcore to pay the rent.  Finally, after a brutal falling out, Susann exacted her revenge on Broadway legend, Ethel Merman as ‘Doll’s fictional barracuda, Helen Lawson.  And while no one really bought Susann’s enduring claim she had ‘composited’ these characters from types, rather than directly to base them on people she actually knew in the industry, her readership flocked to indulge in the smut oozing from beyond those sticky pages of salacious, sex-soaked sin.  

2oth Century-Fox’s involvement on the project likely stemmed from the studio’s time-honored tradition in producing big, splashy movies starring a triumvirate of female stars. Under Darryl F. Zanuck, Fox had an awful lot of success regurgitating this formula in everything from Three Jills and a Jeep (1944) to Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). Moreover, Fox had been at the forefront of tearing down censorship barriers, classing up another bodice-ripper, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place (1957) that, in print exposed everything from drug-addiction to family incest lurking in a small town. Given Jaqueline Susann’s only real publishing success prior to Valley of the Dolls had been a decidedly lighthearted romp involving her poodle, Josephine, we really must give props to whoever was responsible at Fox for acquiring the rights to Valley of the Dolls while it was still in galleys. By the time the novel was a runaway success, Fox had a presold ‘hit’ on their hands. How could any movie based on it fail, especially since Mark Robson, the man responsible for Peyton Place was again in the director’s chair?

Tragically, by all accounts, Robson and his cast – especially Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins, ran into loggerheads at almost every conceivable turn. Co-star, Lee Grant would later condemn Robson as an ‘awful director’ and not much of a human being besides. In preproduction, the executive decision was made to forego bona fide star talent when casting Valley of the Dolls. Believing that the book was its own star, Robson nevertheless entertained some solid choices to appear. Top-billed Parkins was, in fact, the star of TV’s primetime soap, Peyton Place while Patty Duke had been beloved as the star of her own show, billed around the gimmick of Duke cast as identical cousins. Jaqueline Susann had expressed an impossible interest in Grace Kelly who had retired from the movies a decade before to become her Serene Highness of Monaco and would never again appear in movies. At other intervals, producers thought Valley of the Dolls might also serve as a springboard for up-and-coming talents - Barbra Streisand, and, Raquel Welsh as well as to mark yet another ‘comeback’ for one-time Hollywood heavy hitter… (wait for it) - Judy Garland. By 1967, Garland had endured the slings and arrows of another disastrous marriage, a failed television series, and several suicide attempts. Worse, her addiction to alcohol and pills had been resurrected as she struggled with personal debts, so numerous, Garland was virtually living out of hotel rooms, and at times, her car, even as she began costume fittings for ‘Dolls.’ Alas, Garland would find no peace upon her return to the backlot, displeased with just about every aspect of the movie, her character, and, even down to Andre and Dore Previn’s score.

Reassessing the importance – or lack thereof – of Valley of the Dolls, hoping to discover a diamond in the rough is a little like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. It just isn’t there. Determined, with sizable effort, and at even more considerable expense, to transform Jacqueline Susann’s smut-laden, best-selling novel into an, as shocking, exposé on hedonistic Hollywood, Mark Robson was to instead emerge with one of the most scathingly silly bits of super kitsch, ill-conceived in the grand ole manner of a classic Hollywoodized yarn that, by 1967 had become hopelessly dated, and, by today’s standards, cannot help but typify that awkward disconnect between ‘old school’ studio product and the grittier verve for reality soon to become Tinsel Town’s bread and butter. Valley of the Dolls is such an atrocity it can only be viewed in bad taste. And yet, setting aside the idiocy in the exercise, and perhaps indulging in a few ‘uppers’ at the outset, it is intermittently possible to be grotesquely preoccupied and marginally (choke!) entertained by its train wreck.

Our empathy is meant to align with three fair-weather gals on the fast track to nowhere: inexperienced, Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins as the good girl gone bad), who gets a light smack on the tushy and puss as propriety demands, transformed from fresh-faced ingénue into a woman of the world by way of a detour into the not-so-glamorous life of a shampoo spokesmodel (huh?). Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke, woefully miscast) is a ruthless wannabe Broadway/Hollywood ‘has been’ in her own time. Bringing up the rear, buxom Jennifer North (Sharon Tate), a doe-eyed sexpot whose biggest assets are front and center, living to support her money-grubbing mother, doing blue movies to pay the rent. Promoting buzz words ‘fag’ and ‘bitch’ from Susann’s novel – then, virtually unheard in American movies – Valley of the Dolls lacks the crotch-kicking commercial crassness of the book. Robson, an ole-time workhorse, perhaps marginally ashamed this is where those many tenured years have led, struggles to adhere to the novel’s salaciousness. ‘Dolls’ is trying much too hard to remain highbrow when all it really aspires to is manure, not gold.

The failure herein is owed Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley’s screenplay. This emasculates all but the most superficial references to homosexuality in Susann’s novel, relying on the sporadic usage of the word ‘fag.’ What we are left with then is an utterly bizarre cacophony of subplots: a dead-end soap-opera, replete with dirty old men, young sex-crazed Lochinvars, and, unrepentantly greedy, pill-popping social climbers. A real shame too this heap of flailing limbs never entirely finds the right moment to slip out of their Gucci handbags and Armani suits to really show us how uncannily perverse the…um… ‘magic’ of Hollywood can get. For its time, books like Valley of the Dolls were all the rage in the publishing industry. Hollywood, eager to capitalize on their pre-sold titles, remained gruesomely undecided whether to take these stories seriously or simply play them with an overt puerility, perhaps even more disturbing than the truth.  Laugh, fools, laugh! Just don’t choke on your own drug-induced vomit.

It would be very funny – even ironic – if not for some dreadful enactments. Susan Hayward’s tough-as-nails bitch in heels, Helen Lawson (the role Garland gave up) is the shrike of Broadway, stung by Neely with impromptu malice, ripping off her wig to reveal a matted horror of white shag during a bathroom brawl. Personally, I am partial to Tony Scotti’s Vegas-styled lounge lizard, Tony Polar, so badly botched as something of a Tom Jones knock-off, gyrating in his polyester and velvet tuxedo, stricken by one of those undisclosed auto-immune disorders. Having perused Scotti’s screen test, he appears in much better form there than in any scene in the actual movie. Tony’s marriage to Jennifer is despised by his half-sister, Miriam (Lee Grant, utterly wasted, dropping acrimonious one-liners like “in the dark all cats are grey” with faraway viperous glances like Medea on lithium).

Of all the leads, Sharon Tate is the most heartrending, although I am still not entirely certain whether my empathy holds dear because of what is on the screen, or is modeled by my retroactive remorse for those fateful moments she endured on Aug. 8th, 1969; Tate and a gathering of friends violated, then murdered in the most heinous manner by the demented followers of Charles Manson. Tate’s career was arguably going nowhere at the time she married director, Roman Polanski. And, just like her alter ego in this picture, Tate in life played up the part of a woman with limited assets above the neck. Despite stunning looks, it is unlikely Tate would have achieved immortality as a star of the first magnitude after Valley of the Dolls. And yet, her Jennifer is the most genuine creature in this unholy menagerie - truly, its lost soul, whose celluloid suicide ominously foreshadows the nightmare that befell her scarcely two years later.

The late sixties were undeniably a time of great upheaval in Hollywood, the dream factories pretty much a thing of the past, their moguls either deposed, retired or dead, and, their vast empires languishing in the hands of less-than-competent corporate managements only interested in the bottom line on a balance sheet. On the flipside, there was the mainstream proliferation of pornographic publications like Playboy and Hustler, lending credence to the greasy promise every young starlet could go legit by way of a few off-color favors devoted to the proverbial ‘casting couch.’  All of this is alluded to in Valley of the Dolls – the movie. Jacqueline Susann had no compunction about calling out the pleasure-seekers on her own terms. As author, Grace Metalious had done much to blacken the good name of Bible-thumping mid-town America with Peyton Place, Susann’s riveting exposé took dead aim at the peccadilloes of more cosmopolitan folk in Manhattan and L.A. distilled into the East Coast’s Sodom to the West Coast’s Gomorrah of ye modern times.  Was Susann wrong in her assumptions? Hardly. Was she perhaps more flamboyant in her assessments than reality? Perhaps. Did she strike both a chord and a nerve with the public, while casting light – or rather, a pall – on this den of iniquity? Absolutely!

It is difficult to argue with the success of Susann’s formulaic Roman à clef. With so much drivel having followed it since, Valley of the Dolls now appears less likely to have inspired an entire cottage industry devoted to naughty navel-gazing pulp, masqueraded as ‘literature’ with ever-interminable amounts of below-the-belt sex-ploitation. This has long worn out its welcome, or rather, become utterly clichéd to the point where much of the novel now reads as dull to downright mainstream.  Valley of the Dolls concerns itself with an unlikely tri-way bond of friendship. Disparate ambitions force each of the central protagonists to achieve the ripe blossom of their wish fulfillment in different, though no less self-destructive ways, tainted by the feminist notion every Junior Miss can have it all with just a little cleverly timed, go-getting liberation brought forth from their Pandora’s box of tricks, legs crossed while performing the proverbial mind fuck on their unsuspecting male counterparts. Too simplistically, Susann has stereotyped the men in Valley of the Dolls as misogynist dinosaurs, incapable of seeing beyond the bulge in their tight-fitting polyester leisure suits.

The novel is a much more integrated affair than the movie. Both begin presumably as Anne Welle’s story. Having left the repressive New England enclave of Lawrenceville for the big city, B.A. at Radcliffe, Anne moves into the Martha Washington Hotel for Women. She takes a job as an administrative assistant in the reputable law firm of Bellamy and Bellows, attorneys handling legal issues for highly temperamental theatrical clientele. Anne’s first assignment is a doozy - getting Broadway broad, Helen Lawson to give her John Hancock on a pair of contracts. Helen’s crude, cruel and calculating - a real eye-opener for Anne, who also meets prepubescent press agent, Mel Anderson (Martin Milner).  Mel reminds Anne of the boy she left behind in New England, just the sort of nobody good to have as a friend, but a real pill as a lover. Alas, it will not take long for Anne to become acquainted with a new kind of reptile – and pill – barbiturates, popularized as ‘dolls’ in Susann’s novel.  Back at the office, Anne meets Bellamy’s partner, Lyon Burke (played with antiseptic charm by Paul Burke). Rumored around the watercooler as a real wolf, Anne is completely taken in by Lyon’s smooth sales pitch. Lyon encourages Anne to stick with her chosen profession, reminding her that once in a very long while, along with the ripe old queens like Helen Lawson, a real trooper a la Gertrude Lawrence or Mary Martin gets discovered.

Helen wants Neely O’Hara gone from her show. The girl has spunk, talent and, most threatening of all, a choice spot at the end of the first act with a song of her own that will bring down the house if anyone ever hears it. But Helen is the star. And so, the song goes as does Neely, offered the option to stay in her dressing room at a lousy $200 a week for the run of the contract or simply walk away with dignity. Neely chooses dignity – and tears – comforted in her dressing room by Mel, who has nothing but her best interests at heart. Lyon takes pity on the girl and sets up a high-profile appearance during the Cystic Fibrosis telethon. Listening to Patty Duke warble the woefully imbalanced ‘It’s Impossible’ (one of five travesties co-written by Andre and Dory Previn) with a sort of catatonic deadpan, it increasingly becomes impossible to imagine any producer finding a kernel of talent left to exploit. The most amusing aspect of the number is Duke’s stiff-limbed delivery (she looks like a cross between the clubbed-foot Frankenstein monster and scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz…before the pole was removed from his backside!). Neely’s beaded necklace frenetically wobbles about her anemic bosom, forming unusual geometric patterns that draw our undue attention. Duke rolls her eyes as though constipated or about to suffer an epileptic seizure.

Lyon decides to cap off the evening by taking Anne, Neely and Mel on the town. Also present, though not in their party - Jennifer North, out on a date with a much older man. Jen garners the undue attention of the nightclub’s floor show - oily lounge singer, Tony Polar. Who can really blame Jennifer’s awkwardness? In a production plagued by too many misfires, one of the absolute worst is Tony Scotti, his thin, effete voice and goony dark looks hardly matinee idol material. Nevertheless, Jen is smitten. Having thus set up our principal players, the Deutsch/Kingsley screenplay now wallows in the prerequisites of screenwriting 101, frequently strained intersections between these varied lives. Lyon pursues Anne. Neely hits the big time. Jen and Tony are momentarily interrupted by Miriam who harbors a disruptive, sisterly obsession. Jen marries Tony and soon becomes pregnant with his child. Despite having no talent and only marginal looks to pass as anything better than an overstuffed maître d, Tony lands a deal in Hollywood. Too bad, just as Miriam predicted, he soon begins to exhibits the first signs of the family’s medical curse, a congenital brain condition that will ultimately leave him incapacitated and slobbering on his own drool.

Lyon takes Anne to see Helen’s show, an absurdly phantasmagoric revue with Helen belting out some song about planting her own tree while surrounded by a giant, translucent mobile.  We digress even further, into montage, an interminable series of cutaways illustrating Neely’s meteoric rise as the toast of the New York nightclub circuit. On this troubled road to fame, Neely discovers ‘dolls’ – uppers to push her raw talent into the stratosphere – and downers to set her mind at ease after hours. Lyon and Anne become lovers. More sex – behind closed doors – more ‘dolls’ – merely referenced as part and parcel, and, more infidelities, unnaturally masked, but frequently inferring within the course of true happiness - all suppositions made by addlepated minds with nothing better to discuss in between rehearsals and opening nights. Amidst all this headiness in good times and great sex, Lyon suddenly develops cold feet and dumps Anne. She is devastated, but moves on to a new man, square-jawed Kevin Gillmore (Charles Drake), responsible for promoting her as the unlikeliest spokesmodel for a new kind of shampoo. Flying to California with Tony and Jennifer, Anne is inadvertently reunited with Lyon. He is slick as ever. But the bloom of Anne’s naiveté is gone. As Kevin knows nothing of Anne’s previous romance, he is cordial to Lyon who, despite having taken up with a new gal, now cannot help but reason he has made a colossal mistake in ditching Anne.

In Hollywood, Neely becomes a big star. But the breadth of her success is blunted by troubles at home, friction with Mel and constant needling by the studio to be ‘on’ twenty-four hours a day. Mel confides in Jennifer, he believes Neely has already begun to burn the candle dangerously at both ends. Neely confesses to her best friend, Jennifer, the studio has all but kicked Mel off the lot, labeling his concern for her as ‘butting in’ where he is decidedly not wanted. When Neely backs the opinion of studio exec, Ted Casablanca (Alex Davion), Jennifer’s offhanded remark, “You know how bitchy fags can be” does little more than raise Neely’s dander. Besides, Ted gives every indication his predilection is for tarts, not twinks. Neely actually discovers Ted in her pool with a floozy he has promised to mold into a star to replace the increasingly temperamental and very self-destructive Neely. As Tony’s condition worsens, Miriam reminds Jennifer their financial situation is precarious. Tony will never realize his ambitions as a great star – even a mediocre one.

So, it is time to consider alternative ways to make money. Miriam has a thought – a rather insidious one at that – pushing Jennifer into doing ‘French’ art house movies for budding porn director, Claude Chardot (Richard Angarola). Somehow, Anne forgives Lyon his indiscretions and once more falls under his romantic spell.  In the meantime, Neely hits rock bottom for the first time. Finding a seedy theater playing one of Jen’s ‘art house’ movies, Neely, inebriated and full of self-pity, awakens the next morning in a grungy motel room with some man whose name she cannot even remember. Jennifer realizes her slave contract to Chardot is a trap. Worse, she is diagnosed with breast cancer – the ‘kiss of death’ (figuratively and literally) for any superficial creature prided solely on her looks. Forlorn and without recourse, Jen decides to commit suicide – never the easy way out, but an escape from the insanity she has been living for far too long.

Lyon rescues Neely from a near overdose, sending her to the same sanitarium where Tony has been committed. While Neely recovers from her self-inflicted addictions, there is no reprieve for Tony, who sinks deeper into his state of catatonia, momentarily given a reprieve when Neely serenades him with a verse and chorus from his old lounge favorite, ‘Come Live With Me’. Anne begins to suspect Lyon’s interests in Neely run deeper than charity, and, of course, her hunch is right on the money. Thus, Anne leaves Lyon to pursue his flawed relationship. Reunited with her old arch nemesis, Helen Lawson, Neely decides to teach the old broad a lesson. The barbs fly fast and furious. Helen accuses Neely of being a pill-happy addict, and Neely calls Helen ‘grandma’, inferring her beaux are a bunch of sycophantic ‘fags.’ To prove the point, Neely snatches the wig off Helen’s head and attempts to flush it down the toilet. At first humiliated, Helen asks the powder maid how she can exit the gala unseen. But then, with dignity, Helen elects to go out the way she came. Sometime later, Lyon and Bellamy discourage Helen from contemplating retirement. After all, the truly great stars do not retire – nor do they fade into obscurity.  Ever the barracuda, Helen plants seeds of apprehension in both their minds where Neely O’Hara is concerned. Neely does not have Helen’s ‘hard edge’. She never learned to roll with the punches, and in the end, she will never be one tenth the legend Helen is, built to endure – and ultimately, to last.

Having fallen into the same trap as her friends, Anne is stirred to sobriety when her feeble suicide miserably fails. She awakens face down on the wet sands near her California home. It is time to go home – not to New York – but all the way back to Lawrenceville, not really a bad place if you want to wind up married and living the quiet life with no real prospects for fame or fortune. Meanwhile, Lyon has run his course with Neely. Having burned a lot of bridges, Neely is no longer the toast of either Hollywood or New York. In fact, she cannot even hold down a middling ‘star’ spot at a lousy third-rate playhouse in New Haven, accosting her understudy in a drunken rage before being fired and carried out kicking and screaming. Getting quietly stoned at a local bar, Neely is denied last call by the bartender. In the alley just behind, she wallows in self-pity, shrieking her name into the cold night sky with no one left to hear her. Too little/too late, Lyon rushes to Lawrenceville to pledge his devotion to Anne. Mercifully, she has acquired a thicker skin, immune to his faux incredulity. Apologies mean nothing. Anne departs through the snow with sober abandonment, breathing in the crisp morning air. She will never be Lyon’s woman and, for the first time in a long while, she really means it. Life begins anew and sometimes, without the ones we never thought we could afford to lose.

At the time of its release, film critic, Bosley Crowthers noted, “Bad as Jacqueline Susann's ‘Valley of the Dolls’ is as a book, the movie Mark Robson has made from it is that bad or worse. It's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and ‘Peyton Place’ adumbrations…as phony and old-fashioned as anything Lana Turner ever did…All a fairly respectful admirer of movies can do is laugh at it and turn away.” For some obnoxious and inexplicably moronic reason, Valley of the Dolls did respectable box office. It also, almost immediately, acquired a gay following – meaningless, considering the homoerotic aspects of the novel have been completely expunged from the screen, with references to homosexuality reduced to name-calling as ‘bitchy fags’; hardly a rewarding moniker to wear with rainbow-colored pride. Robson’s endeavor was to elevate Susann’s salacious prose to urbane pornography. What he has actually done is transform scandal into camp and not even of the caliber to amuse in an “it’s so bad, it’s good” sort of way.

Barbara Parkins, who is given the plum role as the naïve New Englander, about to have her head and loins turned inside out, is the most obscurely realized character. Anne Welles all but disappears into the backdrop after departing the train in Manhattan. By contrast, Patty Duke’s Neely is the most obscenely flamboyant with Duke exhibiting none of the finely honed acting chops previous displayed in her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker (1962). Herein, Duke is afflicted with over-the-top mania and a streak of self-deluding sadism. So, again, our empathy aligns with Sharon Tate’s cancer-stricken sex kitten, who would rather commit suicide than lop off one of her most marketable assets. Valley of the Dolls is an unmitigated disaster with little if any redeeming qualities. And yet, it is as addictive as the ‘dolls’ it celebrates.

Robson’s workaday direction never rises above mediocrity. The Previns efforts to transform portions of this pic into a pseudo-musical is a bungle, the songs so clumsily slapped together they give new meaning to the phrase ‘tone deaf,’ overproduced, yet undernourished. By 1967, André Previn had all but abandoned his career as a film composer to concentrate on becoming a premiere concert conductor. He was also at the tail end of an imploding marriage plagued by drug addiction.  But the shifting meters and tempos infused here – situated somewhere between jazz/blues and a waltz – are strewn as though composition itself were an afterthought to notes blown through an air hose and kazoo. Composer, John Williams adapts Previn’s efforts with a certain disregard for subtly that mirrors the heavy-handed approach Robson has given the visuals. These remain clunky, noisy and staccato-driven with only Dion Warwick’s faraway and careworn warbling of ‘the theme’, a leitmotif chronically regurgitated throughout. Today, it is quite impossible to deduce what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was thinking in nominating Williams for ‘Best Original Score,’ a prize mercifully awarded to Elmer Bernstein for his lush orchestrations on Hawaii. In the final analysis, “it’s Impossible” to appreciate Valley of the Dolls as anything but a truly horrendous joke.

Owing to its cult status, Criterion was given the opportunity to market Valley of the Dolls.  Their efforts are described as derived from a ‘new’ 2K digital restoration. The transfer is markedly different from the long defunct, deluxe Fox DVD from 2005. The palette herein is decidedly cooler and slightly ‘bluer’ than anticipated – darker too. Snow that appeared white on the DVD has adopted a teal tint, not to the egregious levels generally associated with some of Fox’s other DeLuxe transfers. Flesh tones are markedly improved. Bonus, there! But blacks look rather murky deep gray or ever so slightly tinted navy rather than deep, rich and enveloping black. Colors can appear a tad ‘washed out’ at times. Despite vastly improved textures and overall marginally better detail, the quality of this Blu is underwhelming. Since Valley of the Dolls is now under the custodianship of the Walt Disney organization, it is incredibly unlikely we will ever get a more comprehensively remastered edition on home video.

Criterion gives us a DTS 3.0 audio with crisp-sounding dialogue and Andre Previn’s score and songs achieving a new level of bouncy clarity surely to impress. Extras are heaped upon this release; 2006’s audio commentary from E!’s Ted Casablanca and Barbara Parkins, still a very comprehensive listening experience. Criterion ditches the isolated score tracks – a pity – but keeps the half-hour Hollywood Backstory episode that effectively covers the making of the movie. A pair of interviews with writer, Amy Fine Collins, the first, about Jacqueline Susann and another about Travilla’s costume design, fill a half-hour. Kim Morgan gives a rather fascinating video essay – at only eighteen-minutes, densely packed with revealing stuff. We also get fifteen minutes of footage from Sparkle Patty Sparkle!, a 2009 tribute to Patty Duke at the Castro Theatre. Ported over from the DVD is a rather lengthy piece on Jacqueline Susann, plus two half hour promos from 1967. Film critic, Glenn Kenny delivers an eloquent essay on the movie’s lasting impact. There are also screen tests, trailers and TV spots. Bottom line: Valley of the Dolls is dumb, silly nonsense. The oddity of it remains, still watchable at some level. Criterion’s Blu-ray at least makes the experience of sitting through this weighty, crass and idiotic film marginally agreeable, if, without ever becoming entirely palpable.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

2

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

4