One of the most notorious Hollywood flops of the seventies, and indeed of all time, was this 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s 1968 bestseller MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. So calamitous was the film that it put a near-permanent end to the career of its young director Michael Sarne (who sole feature directorial credit in the succeeding years was 1993’s THE PUNK). It is, however, the most iconic film made by the late Raquel Welch, just 28 years old at the time and already an international sex symbol.
Unlike the novel, which doesn’t reveal its heroine’s true nature until near the end, the film opens with Myron Breckinridge (Rex Reed—yes, that Rex Reed) undergoing a sex change operation by John Carradine in a hallucinatory Fellini-esque operating room. What follows is (according to Sarne) a surreal netherworld caught between the 1930s and 70s in which Myron becomes Myra (Welch), a haughty seductress whose aim is nothing less than “The destruction of the American male in all its particulars.”
To effect this she becomes a professor at a Hollywood acting academy run by her uncle Buck Loner (John Huston), an ex-Western star. Myra isn’t much of a teacher, offering pithy observations about religion and politics, blithely humiliating her students and behaving like a self-important blowhard (a female Gore Vidal, in other words), while a bemused Myron views her antics from the vantage of a spectral movie theater.
Myra’s true concern is deflowering Rusty (Roger Herren), a strapping young actor. This she does in what was advertised as “The most sensational scene in the history of the screen,” getting Rusty to submit to a mock medical examination and, after stripping down to an American flag bikini (sledgehammer symbolism duly noted), raping him with a strap-on dildo.
Co-starring is the 76 year old Mae West, lured out of retirement because Sarne was uncertain that Welch was capable of carrying the film on her own. West, who apparently wrote 90 percent of her dialogue (which includes the legendary refrain “Never mind about the six feet, let’s talk about the seven inches!”) plays a talent agent who only represents strapping young men, including a mustache-less Tom Selleck in his feature debut. Also featured is a debuting Farrah Fawcett as Myra’s lover (making for a veritable repository of deceased Hollywood sex symbols).
As for Myra herself, she flashes back to the accident that started everything off, and concludes the film with an it’s all a…(you know what) denouement. That ending, at least, contains the immortal line “WHERE ARE MY TITS?,” uttered by an embarrassed Rex Reed.
Attempts have been made to recast this film as a misunderstood masterpiece, and while MYRA BRECKINRIDGE is undeniably fascinating to watch, that fascination is strictly of the train wreck variety. The sense of late 1960s anarchy tends to grate, being redolent of the filming, which was reportedly an undisciplined shit show heightened by the presence of Rex Reed in the cast, who used his status as a gossip columnist to report on Raquel Welch and Mae West battling it out and the overall demeanor of Michael Sarne (who, according to Reed, “Everyone hates”). The film is analogous to the 1968 fiasco CANDY, which likewise rendered a notorious sex-drenched novel in an undisciplined swirl of anarchic lunacy (although it’s a better picture overall).
Sarne’s contention that Raquel Welch wasn’t a strong enough actress to carry the film was correct, but the ancient Mae West, behaving like she was still appearing in one of her 1930s-era comedies—i.e. an entirely different movie from the one everyone else was making—was an ill-advised addition. West’s carnal carrying-on actually points up one of this X-rated film’s major issues: it’s not arousing in the slightest. The sexual content is puzzlingly inconsistent, with the dildo rape barely shown and a repulsive masturbation scene by Rex Reed given altogether too much screen time.
The most interesting element is Sarne’s incorporation of clips from old movies, filched from the 20th Century Fox vaults to serve as both punctuation and oblique commentary. The late Bernardo Bertolucci was (mis)credited with pioneering this practice in THE DREAMERS (2003), but Michael Sarne actually beat him to the punch by over thirty years. The reason for the three decade lag was likely because one of the performers who appeared in the old movie clips, Loretta Young (in 1939’s STORY OF ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL), threatened to sue Twentieth Century Fox if they didn’t remove said clip from the film. They did.
Vital Statistics
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
Twentieth Century Fox
Director: Michael Sarne
Producer: Robert Fryer
Screenplay: Michael Sarne, David Giler
(Based on a novel by Gore Vidal)
Cinematography: Richard Moore
Editing: Danford B. Greene
Cast: Raquel Welch, Mae West, John Huston, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett, Roger C. Carmel, Roger Herren, George Furth, Calvin Lockhart, Jim Backus, John Carradine, Andy Devine, Grady Sutton, Robert Lieb, Skip Ward, Kathleen Freeman, B.S. Pully, Buck Kartalian, Monty Landis, Tom Selleck