Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Film: Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Stars: Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, John Carradine

Director: Michael Sarne

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm going to be honest here, it feels kind of mean to put this movie next in our month devoted to Raquel Welch.  We aren't going to be jumping super far after 100 Rifles here for Welch chronologically, and I'll be real that based on the cast list & the genre, I assumed that I'd have liked 100 Rifles more than I did, so we're going to have our third 1-star movie in a row for the actress today.  But it would be irresponsible to talk about Raquel Welch's career and not bring up the nadir of her stardom: Myra Breckinridge.  We'll get into this below, but initially one would've thought that Welch was making a good decision here.  The original novel (by Gore Vidal) on which this story is based was a big deal.  It was certainly controversial (many called it pornographic), but it was celebrated by some (Harold Bloom included the novel in The Western Canon), and for an actress like Welch, who was trying to be taken seriously by her peers, investing in a movie that might do that made sense.  Instead, it nearly wrecked her career (and in some ways caused irreparable damage), and pretty much every person involved with the movie has since opined it was an unmitigated disaster, destroying the lives of several involved & generally being considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) All right, this is a very strange movie, and one that is not sensitive to today's views on transgender issues, so I'm going to be matter-of-fact in describing the plot as accurately as they did at the time.  We open with Myron Breckinridge (Reed), undergoing an experimental surgery at the hand of a surgeon (Carradine, in a cameo).  He is then transformed into a beautiful woman, Myra (Welch) who goes to see Myron's Uncle Buck (Huston) under the guise that Myra is Myron's widow, rather than telling the truth.  Myra is entitled to a portion of Buck's school, and when Buck refuses to give over the school, Myra insists on teaching at the school while Buck comes up with the money.  While there, she meets two "all-American specimens," masculine, handsome Rusty (Herren) and feminine, blonde Mary Ann (Fawcett).  In her quest to "destroy the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood," (that's a direct quote from the movie) Myra sets out to seduce both of them, first Rusty (which she does by raping Rusty with a strap-on dildo), and then after Rusty breaks up with Mary Ann, she starts sleeping with the blonde.  Eventually Uncle Buck concludes Myra isn't who she says she is with him trying to get her to admit she's a con artist, and then she exposes herself (and her apparently still-present testicles) to Uncle Buck, showing that she is Myron.  After this, we see that Myron has just been dreaming all of this-the people were figments of his imagination (Mary Ann was his nurse, and on a nightstand seen by the audience but not Myron as the film concludes, is a picture of a magazine featuring a headline & cover story about "Raquel Welch").

That's the plot in essence, though there are other aspects to the film worth mentioning (specifically that Reed's Myron continues to appear to Myra, frequently lusting after both Mary Ann & especially Rusty from afar, as a figment-of-her-imagination, and a strange subplot involving Mae West's Letitia van Allen as a casting couch-agent who at one point beds an extremely young, pre-mustache Tom Selleck).  But this is enough for you to understand we're in uncharted territory plot-wise, right?  A few years after the fall of the studio system, Frank Capra has officially left the building.

Myra Breckinridge could have been a cult classic.  It has those trappings, just a few years away from the quintessential (and not entirely dissimilarly-themed) Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But Myra is terrible, and not even some of its campier elements can save it.  Myra as played by Welch is a cartoon, a cruel, vicious cartoon, insensitive, degrading, & violent.  She's a weird juxtaposition of celebrating Old Hollywood (in many ways mirroring film critic Red Reed himself in that regard) and wanting to totally defy gender norms.  Her sexuality at the end feels a bit confusing (it feels like her lust after Mary Ann is more real than her lust after Rusty, even though Myron generally feels like he's a gay man in our meetings with him in apparition).  And putting Myra aside, the movie is littered with terrible performances (including from actors like Huston, who are brilliant in other movies), and a plot that vacillates between dumb comedy & abject horror.  Particularly in its strange treatment of the character of Rusty (who is literally raped for laughs at one point in the film), it's just mind-bogglingly awful.

And that was the public reaction.  Myra Breckinridge was an abject disaster for all involved.  Mae West (who came out of a 27-year film retirement to do this movie) & Raquel Welch feuded repeatedly on the set, and the whole film went over budget quickly.  As word spread of what the movie was about (and that it was going to get an X-Rating, one of only two such films to be released by Fox with such a distinction), the use of old footage of movies in the picture was removed due to lawsuits from the original stars; Loretta Young & Shirley Temple (then a UN Ambassador, so even the White House go involved on her behalf) both successfully sued to have footage of themselves removed from the film (though other footage of Temple was still used during the opening of the film).  And the end product was savaged by critics, was a flop at the box office, and since then West, Vidal, Welch, & Fawcett have all publicly disavowed the film.  Sarne never directed another major studio film again, and eventually had to find work as a waiter at a pizzeria to make ends meet.

This also caused big issues with Welch's career.  Welch thought when she was signing up for this film she was taking her career in a different direction, a more serious one like we saw with Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge last month.  Instead, she became something of a joke, and never really got to do a film that was considered "important" in the 1970's.  Next week we're going to take a look at arguably the closest that Welch ever came to actual critical credibility, but it's worth remembering that unlike several of the women we profiled this year, Welch never actually was considered a serious actress (even in hindsight), and a lot of that damage lies squarely at the feet of Myra Breckinridge.