Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

 

Low budget by Hollywood standards, but big budget for Russ Meyer. I can't find my copy of it now, but the author of a book on cult films was disappointed by it. He had admired Russ Meyer's work for years, thinking that if the poor guy had just had some real money to work with, he could make some truly great movies. But then he did get some money and he made a spoof of Valley of the Dolls which was a joke to begin with. I can see what he meant.

 

The script was by Roger Ebert. You can watch the movie with his commentary on the Criterion channel. He said that Meyers told him that his biggest influence was probably Lil Abner, the hillbilly comic strip, and I can see that. He was described somewhere as a "rural Fellini". I don't know if this movie, set in Los Angeles, was out of character for him if if it was what he always wished he could do.

During the Vietnam War, George Lucas was encouraged to go into the military, or at least to not fear the draft. As a film school graduate, he would be made a cameraman and would get a lot of very good training and experience. Which was terrible advice. So many cameramen were killed in Vietnam that once you were in, they wouldn't let you leave. One guy signed up for three years and was there for seven. Lucas lucked out and was rejected for being severely diabetic.

But this was where Meyer got his training, in the Army Signal Corps in World War Two. 

"This is my happening and it freaks me out!" enthuses the host of a large party at his mansion. That got the first big laugh from the college crowd I saw this with forty years ago.

An all girl rock band goes to L.A. They hang around with rich people. There are hippies, Lesbians, a man who turns out to be a woman, a Nazi; the singer's new boyfriend beats up her old boyfriend, and I'm not giving anything away when I tell you there's a horrible mass murder. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but this was from the mind of Roger Ebert who was later outraged by the relatively sedate slasher movies of the '80's. Quite a bit of nudity.