Myra Breckinridge *** (1970, Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch) – Classic Movie Review 2867

Michael Sarne’s 1970 film of Gore Vidal’s witty comic novel about Hollywood seems nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests. Raquel Welch gamely plays the sex-change movie critic heroine Myra Breckinridge, who sets out to avenge herself on mankind.

Five decades later, director Michael Sarne’s 1970 film of Gore Vidal’s witty comic novel about Hollywood seems nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests. However, at the time it helped to plunge its 20th Century-Fox studio into further controversy and financial peril after its debacle with Russ Meyer’s similarly X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

In 1970, it was savaged by critics (Leonard Maltin: ‘As bad as any movie ever made’; Rex Reed trashed it in Playboy Magazine) and Vidal called it the second worst film he’d ever seen (though in a 2009 book he says he has never even seen it). Now it’s a trash cult favourite. It is singled out as one of the films in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and how they got that way) by Harry Medved and Randy Lowell.

Raquel Welch gamely plays the sex-change movie critic heroine Myra Breckinridge, who sets out to avenge herself on mankind with a little help from real-life film writer / critic Rex Reed (who was wise not to become an actor) as her pre-sex-change alter ego Myron.

But it is Mae West’s show, and here (as Leticia van Allen) she is in stunning costumes by Edith Head, a vamping 77-year-old glamorous grannie, hilariously sending herself up and still being funny about sex. It is quite a comeback, as she hadn’t made a movie since The Heat’s On in 1943.

This camp, silly, outrageous movie is a toast to the extravagant, crazy, permissive days of 1970. Roger Herren makes an impressive Rusty Godowski, the empty-headed stud whom Myra infamously abuses, while director Sarne amusingly has a cameo as an acting student. But what on earth is John Huston doing here, starring as Myra’s uncle Buck Loner? Enjoying himself, apparently, as the former cowboy movie star and now acting academy owner.

Also in the intriguing cast are Jim Backus, John Carradine as the sex-change surgeon, Andy Devine, Farrah Fawcett, Tom Selleck, Michael Stearns, Geneviève Waite, Roger C Carmel, George Furth, Calvin Lockhart, Grady Sutton, Robert P Lieb, Skip Ward, Kathleen Freeman, B S Pulley, Buck Kartalian, Monty Landis, Peter Ireland, Nelson Sardelli and William Hopper.

Raquel Welch died at her home in Los Angeles on 15 February 2023 after a brief illness, aged 82.

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