Valley Of The Dolls (1967) Review

By Edward Staiger

Directed by Mark Robson

Starring Patty Duke, Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, Susan Hayward

Going out on a limb can kill you. That’s exactly what happened to Patty Duke when destiny called and she agreed to star in what was then considered perhaps the hottest film project of the year. 20th Century Fox was bringing to the screen Jacqueline Susann’s racy runaway bestseller Valley of the Dolls, and even though always-ailing Judy Garland had already been dropped from the picture and replaced with less-illustrious but robust Oscar-winner Susan Hayward (I Want to Live, 1958), and even though Duke wasn’t the first actress to be considered for the plum role of Neely O’Hara, a singer-actress hooked by fame and barbiturates (at the same time), she was game. She was eager. Eager as a hurricane. Like Neely O’Hara, Duke was also dancing with her own (and much-publicized) demons - drugs, alcohol, plus, as an extra kick, a diagnosis of manic-depression waiting in the wings. As a child (prodigy), she’d already won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar portraying the young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962), but that limb she went out on called Valley of the Dolls also had buds - the limb broke, her film career was nipped in the bud. Nevertheless, in this ill-fated venture in which everyone involved also falls flat on their faces but which became a box office sensation, Patty Duke delivers what must be the most hysterically intense performance in film history/histrionics.

As portrayed by Duke, Neely O’Hara never has a minute’s peace. We meet her as a hopeful ingenue in rehearsal leotards blissfully singing “Give a Little More,” which moments later is going to be cut from this musical because the star of the show, Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward), an aging, sulking diva-bitch, is smoking long cigarettes and talking out of the side of her mouth while green with Neely envy and refusing to sign contracts until she gets her way. Though all the cast, crew and the emissary secretary, played by Barbara Parkins (straight from TV’s Peyton Place), who arrives with the contracts Lawson won’t sign, see Neely as tomorrow’s superstar, the viewer is already creating another kind of scenario which makes a lot more sense: although enthusiastic enough, Patty Duke doesn’t sing a song, she rampages a song. After we also witness Lawson’s big number, an “inspirational” horror called “I’ll Plant My Own Tree” as she’s surrounded by dangling pieces of psychedelic glass (the leaves of this fantastical tree?), and singing in a voice (dubbed by pop/jazz singer Margaret Whiting) as nasal, grating and strident as Duke’s, we realize that the two of them are out of their minds and wouldn’t find success if they were headlining Wednesday nights at the DewDrop Inn in Oshkosh. This doesn’t stop agent Lyon Burke (played by 60s staple, Paul Burke) who’s now dating Parkin’s secretary, from exclaiming, “Off-stage I hate her, but on-stage, I’m madly in love in with her!” In other words, this whole fantastical show-biz world which Valley of the Dolls is taking such great pains to create is completely out of its mind, and the “moviegoer” never recovers from this loss of credulity, which sets the stage for the rest of the melodrama’s fireworks and Patty Duke’s pyrotechnics.

As Neely will do, she storms out of Helen Lawson’s musical and surfaces upon the stage at the annually televised Cystic Fibrosis telethon (there’s a metaphor in there somewhere). She storms through her next song, appropriately called “It’s Impossible,” and because the rendition is so relentless her double strand of beads takes over. We’re first curious and then transfixed by this swinging necklace. As if rewarding our patience, near the song’s climax, as Duke continues shrugging and mugging, the beads separate and then magically loop themselves around both of her breasts. The song is a bummer, but in the world of Valley of the Dolls, with those beads (and the film editor) working overtime, Variety (and then seemingly every other newspaper in the continental United States) can report YOUNG SINGER WOWS AUDIENCE, and a star is born.

The director, Mark Robson, and the screenwriters who adapted the novel, Helen Deutsch and Dorothy Kingsley, were all Hollywood veterans; they’d all been working successfully for decades, they “knew what they were doing,” and in Dolls, they should have known better. Clearly aiming for a “sophisticated” tone swinging, like Duke’s necklace, between George Cukor’s The Women (1939) and Joseph Mankewicz’s All About Eve (1950) where bitchery was witty and went down almost as effortlessly and elegantly as champagne, their work here is so lowbrow and leaden what we’ve got instead is mudslinging in evening gowns that sounds like belching between beers. Most of the time both Patty Duke and Susan Hayward are so low in their vocal registers, they sound less the toast of Broadway than drunken truck drivers toasting - and you’ve got to love them for that. In one of Dolls’ major set pieces, they meet accidentally-on-purpose in a powder room, and the fur flies along with the wig Neely pulls off of Helen’s head. Helen’s hair gets tossed in a toilet bowl and when it won’t go down, Neely hurls the soaking mess, like a mud-ball, right back at her.

Robson’s work is so misguided that his extended montages play as operatically as the opulent murder sequences in the work of Brian DePalma or Dario Argento. Even before the opening credits, as Barbara Parkin’s ho-hum voice-over narration follows her odyssey from smalltown New England to fortune-hunting in the Big Apple, we’ve got slow-motion nonsense at the train station as mother, ex-boyfriend and darling Aunt Amy are waving their arms majestically, up and down, up and down - you’d think they were the national bird about to take off. And still before the opening credits, we’ve got freeze-frame reprises of Parkins telling them all that she’s leaving, and by the looks we see frozen on Aunt Amy’s face, that old bird should be rushed to the hospital. In another montage chronicling Neely’s rise to fame along with how her “doll” addiction commenced, we’ve got our adorable doll under the shower spewing water out of her mouth, then exercising and dancing to frenetic “modern” editing and more splashy psychedelics, then a dose of dolls from the dance instructor, a horizontal melding of their two bodies (I think), or maybe it’s two Neelys, as if Robson had just sat through Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, didn’t understand it, but wanted to use it anyway. In a way, he’s looking ahead to (bad) music videos.

Perhaps the centrepiece of the film, and perhaps the most sustained and (unintentionally) hilarious sequence ever filmed, is Neely’s flashback and voice-over narration of her drug treatment and rehabilitation at the “Longview Sanitarium.” The visuals almost defy description - there she sits in a hot tub imprisoned under a canvas tarp with only her bobbing head visible as her big toe (I’m not kidding) finds a strategic hole it can poke through and wiggle itself before it begins to tear her whole foot through the tarp. There she stands by a piano in the “Day Room,” surrounded by the drooling, doped-up inmates, crooning “Come Live With Me,” apparently a big hit for her and ex-singer/friend Tony Polar (played by record producer Tony Scotti) and now a near-vegetable suffering from Huntington’s Disease and currently a permanent resident at Longview, now wheeling himself through the masses to join Neely at the piano for a surprise reunion and duet. We’re treated to the whole damn song, they’re tearful, they’re troupers, they’re as self-congratulatory as Dean Martin teaming up with Celine Dion - it’s so over-the-top you may never want it to end (and it almost doesn’t), that is, until finally at the finish, when Tony keels over dead exactly on cue. It’s also one of Neely’s quieter moments, as we’ve also had our fill of her screeching for dolls and cigarettes, screeching at nurses, even strangled by a female inmate who’s revealed as “a latent homosexual.”

Valley of the Dolls is a three-ring circus with Patty Duke in the center ring. The aforementioned Barbara Parkins (as subdued as anyone would look if they shared the screen with Duke) occupies one ring, as she too rises to fame as TV’s glamorous “Gillian Girl” selling soaps and shampoos and then also falls to doll addiction when our tireless Neely steals her husband, the aforementioned Paul Burke. Occupying the third ring is poor, doomed actress Sharon Tate (to be murdered by the Manson “Family” a year later) portraying the gorgeous Jennifer, who accurately explains her dilemma on the telephone (with the well-intentioned wide-eyed blankness she uses throughout) to the grasping leech of a mother she supports, “I know I don’t have any talent and all I’ve got is a body.” Thus, she’s sucked into soft-focus soft-porn films, and then, in a major soap-operatic pile-up falls victim to breast cancer, mastectomy, the loss of a husband - she’s married to Tony the Crooner! - and a fatal overdose of dolls.

Wandering about San Francisco on a drunken binge through the red-light district, Neely spots the posters and marquee showing Jennifer’s latest vehicle, and then notices all the strip-joints and topless bars surrounding her and starts muttering, “Boobies, boobies, nothing but boobies….” In misdirected moments like these, Patty Duke is as naked and fearless as any actress you’ve ever seen - transcending the intended comedy. Just prior to that moment saw her singing along with herself on a jukebox in a sleazy bar - her moment of heartbreak interrupted by her own vicious vulgarity as she lashes out at a patron and throws a drink in his face, one truck driver to another, “That’s me - on the jukebox - I’m Neely O’Hara!” Once again, the comic element is squashed - but we don’t pity the actress, she’s ventured beyond them all, these naked explosions transcend any mundane feeling that any viewer might muster up for a deliriously out-of-control actress.

When we last see Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara, she’s strewn about a New York alleyway, drunk and stoned again, her fingers clenched and clawed in an eerily familiar way, her voice squawking once more, “I’m Neely - Neely O’Hara!” in a timbre and intonation just as eerily familiar. What is it? It’s Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. By the end of Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke is as untouchable as the wickedest witch of them all. With a roomful of TV’s Emmy Awards to keep her Oscar company and to follow-up this most memorable of film disasters - as if to exonerate (or exorcize) the loss of her film career - ding dong the “witch” is alive!

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