On Screen

...Here the film might end (you realize that I was giving you the merest thumbnail precis) but we are in for two more desserts...

...The leader of the group, Kelly, has come to claim her part of a large inheritance from her pretty young aunt, Susan Lake, head of a swinging ad agency...

...After numerous odd experiences with his queervoyance, he seeks therapeutic help...

...Z-Man has got Lance in a different bedroom and, as Superwo-man, urges him to come "in the arms of she who is every man's dream...

...As a result, the film emerges curiously schizoid: Mayer's exaggeratedly male, aggressive, brainless lustfulness (or bust-fuiaess...

...the men merely reach for what is ceaselessly dangled at them...

...But a brothel-keeper with delusions of intellectual grandeur who imagines himself to be Hugh Hefner...

...At another such bash, Petro-nella is picked up by the world heavyweight champion and epigrammatist ("If you don't live for now, you might as well just roll over and take the full count...

...Ives, a rising sex-star and dedicated nymphomaniac...

...It is as if Harold Robbins had collaborated on a novel with Gore Vidal: The mating of two antithetical but equally outre sensibilities produces schizophrenic pornography that is so scatterbrained, self-contradictory, funhouse-distorting-mirrory, that it cannot fail to make you laugh...

...When even his female psychiatrist is revealed to him nude, he accepts his manifest destiny...

...another is the English language...

...In Mr...

...Harris is not killed, merely confined to a wheelchair...

...He is called Baxter Wolfe (the mute e, as in Rocke and Thorne, lending cachet to the character), is played by an actor who looks like a cross between a prognathous bull and a curly-lipped runt, and must be the incarnate spirit of this dualistic film...

...But the film, awful, stupid and preposterous as it is, is also weirdly funny and a real curio, rather like a Grandma Moses illustration for a work by the Marquis de Sade...

...Fetching a revolver, Z-Man visits the girls' bedroom...

...Russ Meyer's appearance is that of a former prizefighter now operating a successful chain of South American brothels...

...This suggests that lesbianism is one thing whose technique escapes Meyer and Ebert...

...When Lance refuses to oblige, Z-Man ties him up (we are not shown how he managed it) in a humiliating posture, and, using a sword from one of his mounted suits of armor, decapitates him with a fine faggoty flourish, the blond head zooming off in a perfect parabola...

...There is no stab at believable characterization or narrative...

...Lance is made to wear the tiniest leopard briefs, the girls assume diaphanous lounging garments, and Z-Man, finally revealing his true identity, dons the garb of a campy, comic-strippy Super-woman...

...Teas (1959...

...At most there has been a "middle period," as Richard Schickel calls it, in Meyer's work, when violence along with suitable moralizing preponderated...

...There was "never complete nudity...

...The girls are soon off in a bedroom, where Roxanne lies on top of Casey and...

...Enlisting in the Signal Corps as a combat photographer at the age of 18, Meyer, in peace time, converted from violence to sex and became a purveyor of nudies...

...Now this film is true pornography...

...It also means that Meyer was equipped with a co-scenarist, the aforementioned Mr...

...Fiedler concludes by wondering whether the filmmakers were "really aware of the implications of the movie," and "would like to believe that Meyer [whom he calls Meyers] knew all along not merely how funny but how sad Mr...

...Such girls seem more like fruit than flesh????hothouse fruit, serenely perfect and savorless, not to be touched or eaten...

...All this drives Harris to despair, or, more precisely, into the arms of Ashley St...

...though apparently neither a tribad gifted with an abnormal clitoris nor equipped with a dildo, manages to make Casey have an orgasm just by rubbing against her...

...Significantly, two of his leads are ex-Playboy playmates...

...let's make it in bed for a change...

...Z-Man is likewise killed, but the good, long-suffering Harris is rewarded: In the heat of battle, he bravely leaps out of his wheelchair and deservedly regains the use of his legs...

...a moonlit beach and other choice locations ("We did it swinging from a chandelier, standing up in a canoe...

...This is the sadness of Mr...

...But her willingness to cut Kelly in on a generous share is opposed by Susan's dastardly, scheming, and evilly middle-aged lawyer, called Porter Hall????A typical movie-buff in-joke...

...Only looked a...

...Next, Z-Man chases Casey about to the tune of the 20th-century Fox theme music, having caught her making an sos phone call to her friends...

...Petronella is merely wounded in the arm, her brief unfaithfulness to Emerson condignly but mercifully punished...

...In his first hit, The Immoral Mr...

...It may be, after all, that it is inverts who are especially cursed with bad grammar, as a Mey-erian badge of perversion...

...In response to the call, Emerson, Petronella and Kelly grab a car for Z-Man's Xanadu...

...Unreal...

...In a mad scramble, Casey is killed?her entire face blown off in an oral death seemingly reserved for wicked lesbians...

...When he fails to perform as a nonstop satyr on the back seat of her Rolls-Royce ("It's my first time in a Rolls...

...After much drinking and drug-taking...

...The girls who, in Fiedler's phrase, look more like fruits than women, who bring an entire beauty parlor into the sheets with them, who make love like mechanized rubber dolls, and who emerge from lovemaking absolutely unruffled and with only the one desire to start all over again ????these are truly pornographic inventions...

...And when they are encased in a lurid and libidinous plot that makes neither sexual nor even melodramatic sense????And has the gall to end with a moral preachment and a sense of justice that one would have thought died out with Victorian lady novelists????the product is true-blue onanistic and sadistic pornography...

...As if to punish her for such duplicity, Z-Man pulls the trigger, and a geyser of blood comes gushing out of her guilty, dying mouth...

...When Casey had qualms about that abortion, for example, she exclaimed: "After what happened last night, this could be the only child Harris could conceive...

...All this to the music of the Pol-ovetsian Dances (or, more symbolically, "Stranger in Paradise...

...The partial nudity "existed chiefly to titillate [Teas'] impotent desire...

...The film concerns a three-girl rock group and their young manager...

...an aging, paunchy, voyeuristic delivery boy develops the dubious gift of seeing clothed women as naked...

...Casey is wandering about in a wide-meshed negligee...

...Harris...

...Teas "inhabits a world of prefabricated fantasies . . . manufactured for men powerless to evoke for themselves even the intangible shadow of sex...

...It also caused a law suit by Jacqueline Su-sann, who considered her own Valley lowered by titular association with this blue movie, which goes to show that the grass always looks bluer in the other man's valley...

...I go along with all of Fiedler's points, but cannot share his assumption that Meyer was not "merely exploiting the mindless audience"?and neither, I am sure, could Fiedler, in the light of Meyer's subsequent career...

...At one of Z-Man's mad soirees (where everything goes, from naked dancing, through homosexual oral sex, discreetly suggested, to heterosexual intercourse in a sunken marble bathtub the size of a Hilton swimming pool, she gets involved with a hard-working young Negro, Emerson Thorne, who is putting himself through daytime law school by being a waiter at Z-Man's parties, the night-school of life...

...lesbians, in their sleep, apparently revert to relative heterosexuality...

...In an access of postcoital revulsion, Casey swings over to a predatory lesbian fashion designer, Roxanne, who later helps her get an abortion for Harris' zygote (yes, folks, that one misstep with Harris bore bitter fruit) in return for Casey's body...

...For no visible reason, Kelly also has sex with her enemy, Porter Hall, who wears socks and shorts to bed...

...The women are objects of lust and infinitely lascivious...

...Porter Hall, reduced to a bum, tries to stare in at the ceremony, but the blind is drawn in his face...

...This is followed by an "Epilogue," in which we see a joyous triple wedding: Kelly and the now nimbly mobile Harris, Petronella and Emerson, and the gullible but decent Aunt Susan and a faithful old suitor who has come to reclaim her...

...The couples are of various sexes, ages, colors, yet it all comes out identically homogenized...

...In none of his films is there any trace of insight or intelligence to justify Fiedler's ingenious but ex-trapolative exegesis...

...Roxanne, without waking, begins to give the gun a blow-job...

...A bit thereafter, Harris attempts to commit suicide by jumping from the rafters onto the studio floor where The Carry Nations are taping a telecast under Z-Man's Sven-galian eye...

...This, I think, is the important distinction: whether a film incites to masturbation or leads to intercourse...

...The loving, patient camera (not really a movie-maker's camera at all, but that of the still photographer) that follows the play of light and shade on haunch and hollow finds no human imperfection, not even goose flesh or beads of sweat...

...Unreal...

...It so pleased the powers there that Meyer was promptly signed for a three-picture contract...

...above all...

...Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and...

...Having seemingly similar problems, she and Harris now end up in bed together...

...It is meant to turn you on, but the only people it can arouse are those whose idea of sex is totally divorced from reality...

...Teas finds that the waitress who serves him has become quite naked, except for the merest doily of an apron...

...Z-Man decides to throw a mini-orgy a quatre, and invites Lance, for whom he apparently secretly lusted all along, and the by now happy lesbian couple of Casey and Roxanne...

...On Screen MEYER'S BLUE HEAVEN BY JOHN SIMON c ^^^^ontinuing our survey of recent film pornography, we come to the most peculiar movie of all, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a film Russ Meyer, the doyen of skin flicks, was hired to do for Fox...

...Barzell is the first of a series of caricatures from real life in which the film abounds...

...Yet even this, it would seem, requires an idiot belief in what one is doing...

...he laments), Ashley calls him a fag and goes off with someone who just happens to be on that deserted beach, ready and willing to service her...

...Teas," he wrote, "there was not only no passion, but no contact, no flesh touching flesh, no consummation shown or suggested...

...There is sex and intercourse all over it, but staged and photographed to look merely like an unusual way of playing mahjong...

...But in describing the latest period of the oeuvre (preceding the present film), Schickel notes a happy return to sex: "The films are in color, less moralistic, more surrealistic...

...There is a fair amount of fleeting nudity, but it is all breasts, some few behinds, and nary a crotch...

...Arriving in Los Angeles, they are taken over by a twcntyish pop-music tycoon, Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell, who renames them The Carry Nations...

...and Ebert's smartass, campy, in-joking put-ons...

...The humor is conscious, the editing snappier, concern with character and motivation less careful...

...There seems to exist a pornography for potency, and a worse pornography for impotence...

...Randy Black????no interracial intercourse in Meyer's reverently box-office-watching film...

...The higher production cost means that bosoms now come in all sizes from medium to mammoth, in both black and white, and...

...T here is, first, a recapitulation of the film's highlights, with what may be Meyer's voice telling us in didactic tones where and to what extent the characters went wrong, and how they were punished or redeemed????justice being infallible in the Meyerian macrocosm...

...she always needs some kind of artificial support for her breasts which, unsupported, would flop right out of the low wide-screen frame...

...The third girl in the trio, Petro-nella, is black...

...Teas really was...

...Although Kelly is Harris' girl friend, she falls under Z-Man's baleful spell and is soon shacking up with a pretty blond boy from his demi-monde, Lance Rocke, who ought to be a homosexual gigolo but is presented as a heterosexual one...

...Teas...

...But Roxanne is there, sleeping the sleep of the just fagged-out, and he inserts the gun between her sensually parted lips...

...by all accounts, a rather fey put-on artist...

...everything simply leads to yet another prettified and disembodied scene of sexual activity...

...Since the Nazi butler is a witness to the crime, Z-Man chases him out into the ocean and, to the music of the Ride of the Valkyries, repeatedly perforates him in mid-surf, making the green one red...

...Reviewing the film for the first issue of Show (October 1961), Leslie Fiedler made a number of interesting points...

...What we are shown when the [censorship] rules are observed is not female flesh, but pin-up pictures????moving pictures of moving pin-up pictures, life twice removed...

...the now equally repentant Kelly lovingly returns to her dear paralytic...

...M_ - - second girl in the group and a senator's daughter, who was always somewhat squeamish when Harris and Kelly were making it in front of her????Alerting us to her lesbian tendencies????has been popping the pills rather hard...

...Porter Hall having played the villain in numerous B-movies of the '30s and '40s...

...Except for one freak, all the women, even the walk-ons, are gorgeous, or, rather, what Meyer considers to be so...

...Teas cost $24,000 and grossed over a million...

...Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cost a million and a half, which in Meyerian terms is a superproduc-tion...

...Z-Man then disrobes, revealing his even truer identity in the form of two tiny tits, the shape and size of half-eaten ice-cream cones...

...Schickel's article (Harper's, July) concerns a Russ Meyer retrospective that was presented by a Yale Law School student group...

...in far greater profusion than before: What used to be a mere constellation has become a Milky Way...

...Emerson catches Petronella in flagrante, is roughed up by Randy, but soon reconciled with his repentant sweetie...

...In these pictures characters tend to be led around by their insatiable, but relentlessly cheerful, sexual appetites...

...it brought Meyer and his new co-scenarist, Roger Ebert, to New Haven, along with a bevy of Meyer starlets, and generally created a mild stir, though it is debatable whether it succeded in establishing Meyer as an auteur...

...If Russ Meyer did not believe in his work, did not, for all the camp Ebert was allowed to bring into it, take that work and himself seriously, there would be no real pornography????only the obscene gestures and posturings of a Myra Breckenridge...

...Unreal...

...While Fiedler went on to busts of a different kind, Meyer stuck to bigger and bigger bosoms, bigger and bigger skin flicks...

...His butler, a beefy German and ex-Nazi, rumored to be Martin Bormann, serves in SS regalia...

...even Harris, wheelchair and all, tags along...

...Now we come to Fiedler's key observation: "Nowhere is there a pimple or blemish or sagging skin or untoward wrinkle or mottled flesh...

...Sitting, for instance, in a cafe, gnawing on an obscenely large slab of watermelon, Mr...