For those of you who already know and love the camp classic Valley of the Dolls, you know how difficult it can be to pick a favorite scene, so jam-packed is it with gems. There's the one in which Neely O'Hara (played by Patty Duke) makes her Shatner-esque singing debut, another where she rips the wig off Helen Lawson's head, and of course her incredible back alley breakdown. (Act Patty! Act!)
But my all-time favorite scene from this film is the amazing performance of an Andre Previn song called "Come Live With Me" in which Tony Scotti delivers lyrics about the transient nature of love in such a brassy, inappropriately loungey way that every ounce of feeling in the rather sad song is drowned out by his oily sheen, eclipsed by the glare of his red sharkskin suit. It's kind of like watching Robert Goulet sing an Elliott Smith song, or perhaps a Broadway musical turned into a snuff film.
Later the song is reprised by Duke and Scotti during Neely's stay in a sanatorium, where she's sobering up from the titular "dolls"--the uppers and downers on which she's become dependent. Inexplicably, the lobby of this institution is more nightclub than nut house, complete with a piano player, drummer, and saxophonist (all mental hospitals have house bands silly), and Neely--who may have given up the pills but who cannot, will not kick her addiction to the spotlight--nostalgically sings the tune her old pal once performed with such charisma and style.
Little does she know that Tony is slumped in the back of the room, the perfectly tanned victim of Parkinson's Disease. Hearing his old hit momentarily revives his disease ravaged mind and he joins in, wheeling over to Neely from a shadowy corner. He sings rather softly this time, but eventually can't help spreading in some of the ol' Brylcream cheese...a little of that "fly me to the moon" panache that goes so well with lines like "love is the flower that lives for an hour then whithers and dies."
After Valley of the Dolls, I decided to keep the laughs coming with Hamlet 2, in which failed actor turned teacher Dana Marschz (played by the hysterically funny Steve Coogan) writes a sequel to the Shakespearian tragedy in order to save the high school drama program from budget cuts. Marschz is presented as a fool: a guy who occasionally wears caftans, talks too much about his abusive father, and giggles like a schoolgirl upon meeting his favorite actress. His play is deeply ridiculous, a musical acid trip in which Hamlet and Jesus use a time machine to save Gertrude and Ophelia, but to his students who are at that age when irony is at ebb tide, it's a challenging and dramatic work, and it comes to life in their hands. At the outset the musical numbers are funny in an offensive kind of way, then genuinely catchy, and then... strangely moving.
Marschz convinces the deeply adorable Tucson Gay Men's Choir to provide backing music for the play, and in its final sequence they softly begin singing a Bernie Taupin lyric, "When I think of those east end lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs." Jesus turns to Hamlet and says, "You must forgive your father the abuse you suffered," then, "you have my cell number, right?" A woman's voice joins in the singing as Hamlet and Laertes fight with plastic light sabers in front of a beautifully stark castle interior. ("Sweet freedom whispered in my ear.") The harmonies grow more complex and Hamlet saves his mother from drinking poison. Ophelia spins gracefully, alone in front of projected ocean waves as the chorus cascades, "someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my life tonight...". The play, in other words, has become absolutely filled with pathos, its themes of suicide and revenge suddenly poignant and its depictions of madness, lyrical. After he administers CPR to Ophelia, Hamlet proposes to her.
"As ridiculous as the play is," said actress Epiphany Sellars, "it actually works in a weird way and I have this sense of real pride of what we have done." Co-writer Pam Brady said "A lot of the stuff was a surprise. The stuff that we thought was like a super joke ended up feeling meaningful and deep. We were really surprised by that and we were trying to act like it was designed that way."
She's exactly right. Ask me why the long suffering characters in Valley of the Dolls made me cackle while Hamlet 2 moved me to tears, and I'm not sure I could explain. All I know is that yesterday a drama made me laugh, a comedy made me cry, and the spreadsheet got done. I'm awarding Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming an overdue Lloyd Award for creating one of the best film-music moments of 2008.
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