My favorite scene in this movie is the scene where the "squares" are watching the girl band at a dance, because there are so many young people and pretty girls wearing frilly frocks in confectionery colors with nicely coiffed hair and beautiful smiles, and the music is fun and the color cinematography is bright and clear. But I am aware that what I am actually admiring is the fresh youthfulness and energy of an era that's captured nicely with good color photography, and the casting of pleasing-looking actors, Playboy models with great figures, talented singers, and so forth. People often use words like"camp" and "satire" indiscriminately, applying it to any retro vehicle that's excessive. But this movie has no meaningful referents, containing as it does a lack of dimensional characters or any ideas or emotions about anything it depicts (a campy movie is always passionate about its subject matter, and a satire is clear about what it is mocking), plus it is also staunchly heterosexual in its sensibilities and status-quo about sexuality. So it's not actually camp or satire, it's more just unfocused gleeful nihilism. It's a Russ Meyer world where women contain none of the feminine complexities they contain in life, and where the characters seem less than the actors portraying them. It ends with a "blow up the world and the film and the plot because nothing matters" sort of ending, which for me sort of sums up the attitude of the movie as a whole to its audience and cancels out some of the previous pleasures of its mise en scène. But for those to whom nihilism equals a rollicking good time, this is the perfect cocktail.
Review of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
