Movie: Myra Breckinridge

This 1970 spoof has been on my want list for decades. It’s recently been reissued at a reasonable price.

Variously described as “the worst movie ever made” or a breakthrough in socio-sexual relations, Raquel Welch plays a transgender woman looking to claim an inheritance owed to her male former self. Costars Mae West, John Huston, Rex Reed, John Carradine, Jim Backus and a very young Farrah Fawcett (wearing a lot of filmy see-through clothes) and Tom Selleck.

1970 was a year for experimental cinema.  In addition to the outrageous premise, the film shamelessly recycles clips from many other movies. Like Medium Cool or Putney Swope, it hardly makes any sense but it has a sort of Laugh-In gleefulness.

One of the Special Features on this disc is a feature commentary by Raquel Welch.  Now, she has a good sense of humor and I was looking forward to laughing along with her.

Nope.  She starts out by saying, "I'm Raquel Welch and I played Myra Breckinridge.  It seemed like a good idea at the time."  Then she lapses into silence, admitting she hadn't seen the movie "in a long, long time" and obviously she had no prepared notes or insights she wanted to share.  Occasionally she'll mutter, "Oh my, look at that!" or "Doesn't John [Huston] look dashing" or something like that, but otherwise she's completely silent.  She DID mention that when she took the role, she was expecting to play both the female role of Myra and the pre-op male role of Myron, which eventually was given to Rex Reed (somewhat inexplicably).  She thought it would've been an interesting challenge to play a man and I have to agree -- Raquel being one of the premier female sex symbols of the time.  However like Julie Andrews in "Victor Victoria" she probably would've been a dead giveaway so who knows.  Having Rex as her male half is, like much else with this film, totally unexplainable.  Especially as they appear together on-screen numerous times.

Much more interesting is the bonus feature of a 2001 episode of "Backstory" about the making of Myra Breckinridge, which has all of the behind-the-camera intrigue, interviews with the stars, stories about the script (or lack thereof...), an interview with Gore Vidal, and lots of dirt.  Mae West hadn't acted in 20 years when she took the part, and thought it was supposed to be a comeback vehicle for herself.  She sabotaged Welch and the director at every opportunity.  She rarely left her trailer.  The movie was a box office bomb, and the director never directed again.  Even Rex Reed has some trenchant comments on the thing.  That docu alone was worth the price of the DVD.

The commentary on Myra Breckinridge mentioned that the film would be pretty much unfathomable unless you'd read the book, so yesterday while I was waiting for Ted Chiang I picked up a copy of Gore Vidal's 1968 novel. We'll see if it helps explain the movie.

I've never read any Vidal before, because it was my impression he was a smug self-centered name-dropping social butterfly.  

My impression was not far off base.

Gore Vidal wrote:

This is all a bit fey for my tastes.

The trailer for the movie says something like "The book that couldn't be written is now the movie that couldn't be made!"

The book is fey and mannered and oh-so-self-conscious but it's a damn sight better than the movie. If the director had just stuck to the book, and filmed what Vidal wrote, the movie would've been just a B-movie cult classic instead of "one of the worst movies ever made." I can see why Vidal disowned the movie. It bears only passing resemblance to what he wrote.