Myra BreckinridgeDirector: Michael SarneGenre: Cult Publisher: Twentieth Century Fox Released: 1970 MPAA Rating: R Cast: Mae West, Raquel Welch, John Huston, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett |
A Review by Dan Callahan
03/09/2004
Vidal's novel, a popular success in the late 1960's, is at its best when it sticks with its heroine, the transsexual, swashbuckling Myra, and at its worst when Vidal halts her exploits in order to broadcast his familiar thoughts on American society. A bold gender fuck of a book, it features an extended pornographic scene in which Vidal gets his Caligula rocks off by having Myra rape a straight male character. To make his bawdy reverie into a movie would have taken real imagination.
Sarne at least had the imagination to put together a lunatic cast: Rex Reed as Myron, who will become Welch's Myra, John Huston as a lecherous cowboy, Farrah Fawcett as a dumb aspiring actress, and, his masterstroke, seventy-eight year old Mae West as talent agent (and recording star) Leticia Van Allen. West, who hadn't made a movie in close to thirty years, insisted on top billing and wrote all her own scenes. She and Welch clashed immediately, and the studio executives clashed with Sarne. Meanwhile, Vidal and Reed bitched it up on talk shows about how lousy the movie was while it was being shot, and it promptly laid an egg.
I have seen Myra Breckinridge at least ten times in a cropped bootleg video version. Yes, it's bad, but you quickly get beyond its badness. It's hypnotically awful. It's audaciously dreadful. It consists of mismatched elements that you wouldn't ever dream of throwing together, and, in an alternative universe sort of way, it almost works.
Sarne provides some clues as to why the movie went astray in his commentary track. When Fawcett gets up off the floor in one scene, and you see her white panties, he crows, "That's the best part of the film!" This explains the many arbitrary shots of women's bodies throughout the movie. The camera roams around stoned out of its mind and it will literally bend over backwards to get a look at some cleavage. Sarne was quite uncomfortable with the gay material, and so he withdrew into English private school camp and arbitrary film clips meant to distract the audience from what was really going on. Instead of "Gore's wet dream," his idea was to have the entire film be the fantasy of a gay film critic (Reed). I never realized that until Sarne verbalized his concept at the end of his commentary track.
Welch's commentary is hilarious. "Why did I take this part?" she wonders. "I don't know who I'm impersonating here. Gore Vidal? As a girl?" When she sees the immortal long shot of her ass lined up with Huston's ass and a horse's ass, she cries, "Oh! It's a threesome!" Recalling the first time she met West, Welch says, "I thought she was some kind of dock worker in drag." As she watches herself give head to Reed, she wonders, "I wonder how he boned up for the part?" But the funniest thing she says is her sarcastic appraisal of Fawcett's performance. "They have Farrah acting like an airhead there. Of course, that's not how she is in real life. Far from it!"
As you can see, Raquel was not bad casting for this drag queen part, and she seems to be enjoying herself on screen. Sarne points out that Reed wanted to be seen as straight ("De-Nile is not just a river in Egypt!" he quips on his track), and this leads to even more confusion. "Try this banana," Farrah says to Reed, in a weird fantasy sequence. He chomps down on it suggestively and she cries, "Oh! A big bite!" And later on, in a voice-over scripted by the film critic himself, we hear Reed say, "It's eight bars and out, honey. You were no more than a Linda Darnell paper doll." Aren't we all.
Presiding magisterially over this colorful mess, Mae West seems right at home. Sarne sided with her in her disputes with Welch and Reed, and he rightly says that the movie would be a lot worse without her. In some strange way, just the sight of West in action gives you the spirit of Vidal's book. The fact that she's close to eighty years old and still lapping up attention from every man in the room only emphasizes the fantasy aspects of her 1930's movies. By all accounts, West took her sex symbol status seriously, right up to the end, and this only adds to the joke, to the legend. A few years later, at the age of eighty-six, West made the jaw-dropping Sextette (1978), in which she had a young Timothy Dalton croon a love song to her. Beyond bad, yes, and what lies beyond bad? Sublimity.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 03/09/2004
