Where are my TITS?

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Myra Breckinridge" is a wacky, nonsensical mess of a travesty, and I liked it. I suppose it is a guilty pleasure on all counts but it is never boring and consistenly mesmerizing in its attemps to film the unfilmable, namely a book by Gore Vidal of the same name. I've read portions of the book (written as a diary) and it is so suffused with sexual explicitness and innuendoes of every kind at every turn that no film could ever really do it justice, especially when the book's main theme is that heterosexual men can be made into homosexuals. The film adaptation doesn't quite fulfill the book's themes, nor is it as pointed in its criticism of WASP values as it is a critique of Hollywood at its most base. Still, the fact that someone tried to make a film out of it is cause for a minor celebration.

Rex Reed (in his sole leading role) is a homosexual writer named Myron, who undergoes a major sex operation and becomes Myra (played by Raquel Welch). Never mind that Welch looks nothing like Reed - hey, it's a movie - but that there is no real correlation in their behavior either. This is probably why writer-director Michael Sarne chooses to have Rex Reed on screen at the same time as Welch, and they both talk to each other! At one point, Reed masturbates and imagines fellatio with Myra, I gather, in a scene that must have caused more laughter than hysteria of the inclusion of such a scene in an X-rated film of 1970.

So we have John Huston as a former movie cowboy with an oversized hat running an acting school that admonishes the film acting found in B-movies, though Myra is of the opinion there is value to be found in them. There is also a stoned John Carradine smoking a cigarette as he performs the movie's opening operation; Mae West as a Hollywood talent agent who has an affinity for male hunks and makes more sexual remarks and double entendres than any of her past movies combined; Farrah Fawcett as a slightly dim blonde who loves Myra; and a scene involving sodomy with a dildo that is neither as ugly or unwatchable as its reputation seems to suggest.

In fact, "Myra Breckinridge" is hardly as wrenchingly bad as its reputation suggests. This is a far better wacky film of wacky proportions than Gus Van Sant's unwatchable atrocity of an unfilmable novel, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." "Myra Breckinridge" forges sex jokes galore but it is also a condemnation of any Hollywood movie made before the MPAA ratings were implemented. Scenes of Rex Reed are a bit long on the tooth - he is not a charismatic actor and looks zombiefied throughout - but he himself has expressed more admiration for any movie made before 1950.

I would say some novels are not meant for film adaptation but "Myra Breckinridge" features Rex Reed at his liveliest only when dancing and cavorting with Welch while listening to Shirley Temple's song "You Gotta S-M-I-L-E (To Be H-A-Double P-Y)", and he even gets to say the line, "Where are my tits?" I can say that although the movie's pleasures may be small, I did get a kick out of it and enjoyed this garish, brightly lit opus that is like a zonked-out, flashy erotic dream drained of eroticism. Interesting.