Valley Of The Dolls (1967) TCM recently ran this glossy mope opera as part of series of what they considered movies so bad, you could knock yourself out mocking them.
In other words, guilty pleasures to freely hurl Mystery Science Theater 3000 insults at, while you gobble down buckets of buttered popcorn.
But this one? Not even. It just lies there and stinks on ice with any unintentional laughter anywhere in sight.
It originated as trashy a best seller from Jacqueline Susann, a failed 1940's starlet who re-invented herself as would-be novelist......think of her as the "50 Shades" E.L. James of the 70's, with a prose ability at the level of 6th grader.
Susann crafted her crude, semi-sleazy show-biz melodramas with characters she obviously based on real life celebrities......and amassed enough of a readership panting to find out who was going to play who in the movie version.
20th Century Fox entrusted director Mark Robson with bringing the author's first big hit "Valley Of The Dolls" to the screen........who else but the guy who managed to turn the notorious Grace Metalious novel "Peyton Place" into a shameless wallow that racked up big B.O. numbers.
Lightning didn't strike twice, though. Audiences found "Valley" a dull, plastic bore.....and with only a few exceptions, indifferently acted by a cast of generic non-entities. It wasn't even worth the time to ridicule it.
Three young beauties try to navigate their way through the treacherous perils and pitfalls of a life in showbiz. Anne Wells (Barbara Parkins) goes for behind-the-scenes jobs on Broadway, Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) becomes a Monroe-like bombshell. And finally, to keep the melodrama at a full boil, there's wanna-be future diva Neely O'Hara (Patty Duke) a Judy Garland clone headed for drugs (the "dolls" of the title) and career disaster.
I won't even waste time on the various men surrounding them....all cardboard cutouts, instantly forgettable. Only Patty Duke, smelling a possible Oscar nomination, goes all out with the histrionics which earned her nothing but ridicule. Doing her best to out-do her......veteran Susan Hayward as Duke's nemesis, a braying Ethel Merman-esque harridan .
As much as I love the curating of the TCM programmers( the ones who escaped the layoffs, anyway), the passage of years did NOT turn this tiresome turd into some kind of campy joy to watch. It remains what it always was.......assembly line studio sausage unfit for human consumption.
For true, undiluted guilty pleasure madness, stick with the immortal Russ Meyer-Roger Ebert classic "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls".....which in 1970 delivered everything the original "Valley" promised but could never even dream of delivering.....gobs 'n gobs of sex 'n violence.
For '67's 'Valley'......Zero stars (0)....un-campy, unfunny.....infinitely skippable.....
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