Myra Breckinridge

When I saw 'Myra Breckinridge,' the projector broke down no less than eight times throughout the films's 94-minute duration. In most cases, this would be an inexcusable annoyance for me, but in this case, I was grateful. After every ten minute stretch of this film, I felt like I needed some respite.

The only reason to see this movie, the only thing I found remotely entertaining or funny, is to see film critic Rex Reed masturbating. Years later, Reed savaged David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' with an angry zeal and called the movie "brain-damaged garbage" and also displayed a fragile sensitivity in denouncing the sickness of Pasolini's 'Salò.' Watching him in 'Myra Breckinridge' gives new dimensions to those reviews.

Whatever the merits of 'Valley of the Dolls,' it's a genuine camp movie because it achieves that status unintentionally. It played itself straight and failed as a drama. The intent with 'Myra Breckinridge' seemed to be, from the very start, to make the next camp classic, and so the film has no dramatic level on which to fail. It cuts straight to the camp and does it horribly.

Quite how this became Hollywood's most famously reviled and ridiculed creation is almost as mysterious as how such a bizarre film was ever made in the first place.

It's the story of a gay film critic knocked unconscious in a car accident who then dreams he has undergone a sex-change operation and been recreated in Raquel Welch's image. I managed to work that much out after two viewings, the first wondering what the hell I was seeing and the second spotting the few clues to the "plotline" that exist between the scenes of insane camp and bizarre sexual acts.

Somehow, through all the confusion and early '70s delirium, I found myself enjoying it. It is a ridiculous mess, but where else are you going to see the legendary John Huston receiving a brutal Swedish massage and Raquel Welch in glorious widescreen, Technicolor Panavision wearing a strap-on and cowgirl outfit ensemble? Not in Legally Blonde, I know that much.

The widow of a gay movie critic hopes to collect on her husband's inheritance, which includes a drama school in Hollywood run by her in-law, Buck Loner, a faded cowboy star. Despite 20th Century-Fox keeping this thing under-wraps for years, the notorious "Myra Breckinridge" is finally beginning to get the recognition it deserves. This Hollywood satire is indeed a misfire, but it isn't a boring one. Based on Gore Vidal's acidic book, it's an amusingly trashy, wicked and low-down look at Hollywood's loss of morals; it isn't meant to be high-brow, and Raquel Welch is ballsy and bitchy as the gal who takes on Tinsel Town. Rex Reed is her alter-ego, John Huston is perfect as Uncle Buck, Mae West is dazed but ribald as a man-hungry talent agent, and Farrah Fawcett is a sweetly stoned ingénue. Vidal (who penned one of the first screenplay drafts himself before being kicked off the project) chastised the picture but, despite some choppy editing and an uncertain direction, it's a movie perfectly in-tune with the source material. After some 30 years, the times have finally caught up with "Myra Breckinridge". **1/2 from ****

The book "Myra Breckinridge" is marvelous, and so is its nutty sequel "Myron" (which takes place on the set during the making of the Maria Montez movie "Siren of Atlantis" and, in its original published version, is a diatribe against censorship and finds new ways to use the name Rehnquist). The movie, a big flop in 1970, is not marvelous, but starts intriguingly and still has an aura of the forbidden about it (it was rated X; in 1970 that wasn't a liability, it could be a marketing scheme). The Fox Movie Channel showed the film recently in widescreen and I watched it (the latest in several viewings ) and I failed to notice exactly when it begins to unravel.

In spite of its ultimately depressing and sleazy tone, the movie does have some lovely things in it: the winking girl who pops up in various scenes throughout, Raquel Welch's game, amusing performance, an intriguing visual style, the usage of old movie clips to comment on the action in a meta-cinematic manner (my favorite is the brief glimpse of Marilyn Monroe in the unfinished "Something's Got To Give," a glimpse that could have been furthered), a bizarre underused supporting cast of excellent Old Hollywood character actors (Jim Backus, Kathleen Freeman, Grady Sutton, Andy Devine, John Carradine, etc.) and a short appearance by Genevieve Waite, the star of the director's previous, and only, hit film "Joanna." Waite is also the mother of Bijou Phillips and the ex-wife of John Phillips, of The Mamas and The Papas. (John Phillips wrote the song "A Secret Place" that was used in the film.) I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when the movie was being made. Rex Reed, one of the stars in the film, WAS a fly on the wall and wrote about the fiasco in Playboy magazine. Then he went on The Mike Douglas Show and gave out his Christmas list. To everyone who saw the movie "Myra Breckinridge" he gave a case of amnesia.

I agree with another comment here that the movie has finally caught up with its audience, but only if you know a little something about Old Hollywood and really love cinema.

I read "Myra Breckinridge" in 1969 when I was riding a bus from St. Louis to San Antonio, and I fell in love with everything about the book. I saw the movie when it first came out (even though I was not, legally, old enough) and had a blast. This film (I do NOT use that term loosely) had so much going on and not going on between pretty people and not so pretty people who were acting badly and beautifully while doing evil and funny and disgusting and sweet things to each other in the most vicious and caring ways possible, I was overwhelmed by it all. It had more to say in its heaving breast about the cruel and elevated ways in which man treats his fellow man than every Oscar-winning picture since...and all while telling its story in the most absurd and drug-inducing manner possible.

But what adds even more to the meaning of the film is how it destroyed the career of not just its director (who probably deserved it) but also ruined any chance of a career for Roger Herren solely because he played a character who was raped by a woman. Men can play rapists and women can be raped and gang raped and even play lesbians, and they receive Oscars for their performances and no one thinks the worst of them. But let a man get sodomized and suddenly everyone questions his masculinity and ability to relate to the opposite sex. And THAT is where MYRA BRECKINRIDGE stands tall.

Yes, the movie is a smash-up of styles and insane casting choices and baldly ludicrous dialogue and unintentionally funny acting, but so were more recent idiot movies like THE ROCK and TITANIC and SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, and look how successful they became...and how quickly they will be forgotten. At least MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, the movie (maybe even moreso than the book), worked as a slap in the face of America's sexual dysfunction and hypocrisy...and I believe THAT is what bothers so many people about it. And that is why it remains a movie worth watching,