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Critics Consensus: Trashy, campy, soapy, and melodramatic, Valley of the Dolls may be a dud as a Hollywood expose, but has nonetheless endured as a kitsch classic.
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Critic Consensus: Trashy, campy, soapy, and melodramatic, Valley of the Dolls may be a dud as a Hollywood expose, but has nonetheless endured as a kitsch classic.
All Critics (31) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (20) | DVD (9)
Too dull even to function as camp.
Jacqueline Susann's 'exposé' of Hollywood gets the cliché-ridden treatment it deserves from Robson.
It's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and Peyton Place adumbrations.
It tries to raise itself to the level of sophisticated pornography, but fails. And it is dirty, not because it has lots of sex in it, but because it firmly believes that sex is dirty.
Valley of the Dolls rose from the ashes to become a so-bad-it's-good cult film of the highest order.
In its melodrama, Valley of the Dolls may be reduced to trashiness, but we'd be denying its skill and sensitivity, and perhaps the value of trash. It's not so bad it's good; it's just good in a different way.
It thinks it it is incredibly sophisticated and clever, when it is just the dumbest damn thing.
The newfound envelope-pushing in cinema, tested so brilliantly in 1967 by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, is botched here.
It has much of what we require from truly great camp; namely, it takes itself with utter seriousness, and the further it goes down that rabbit hole, the less aware it seems of its own ridiculousness, the funnier it becomes.
Director Mark Robson gives the film a thin veneer of respectability, but mostly stands by while it descends into absurdity.
Dark, campy melodrama with focus on sex and drugs.
At the time sordid, now blase look at drug-infested Hollywood.
A terrible film that feels tremendously dated today, as I imagine it did just as well back in the 1960s (although obviously not from a thematic point of view), like a mawkish vintage soap opera that is not ashamed of its laughable dialogue and absurd situations.
Super Reviewer
A fairly good take at the life of the 60s but I didn't care for it very much.
Valley of the Dolls follows the lives of three young women as they struggle to succeed in the cutthroat world of show business. Along the way they contend with drug abuse, alcoholism, adultery, abortion, Huntington's disease, suicide and Susan Hayward. In 1967 it's racy, risqué and controversial. In 2011 it seems exaggerated, sensationalized and preachy.
Maybe it's a bit slow and we've seen this theme often, but this movie has something, it's very timely for the late sixties, and the cast is great. It's a good drama, even though some people think of it as campy now, I still like it.
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