Anyone who is a fan of Roger Ebert’s work might scratch their head when they finally come across his screenplay credit for “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
“You mean the Russ Meyer movie? The guy infatuated with enormous breasts? That Russ Meyer?”
Yes, that Russ Meyer. He worked with him on three movies, starting with “Dolls,” and for a while I looked at their low IMDB grades and wondered if this was a part of Ebert’s career he was trying to erase.
But having just finished reading Ebert’s memoir “Life Itself” (a brilliant, moving book by the way), you begin to fully understand why Ebert would come to have such a mutual bond with Russ Meyer and how “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” could really be no different than the absolutely batshit crazy sexploitation film that it is. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”