Summary: after going to Europe to have a sex change operation, Myron Breckinridge is transformed into Myra, who claims to be Myron's widow. Performers: Raquel Welch, Mae West, John Huston, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett, Roger Herren, Calvin Lockhart, Jim Backus, John Carradine, William Hopper.
I’m usually all in for bad movie classics, just out of pure curiosity. Besides, guilty pleasures or no, some provide considerable entertainment value. Anyhow it was a little out of character that I waited so long to catch Myra Breckinridge. But since there’s a DVD copy at my local library I decided, what the heck, I’ll give it a whirl and see what happens. I was happily surprised. Contrary to its reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, Myra Breckinridge is actually pretty good, in a Valley of the Dolls sort of way [1]. Say what you will about Myra Breckinridge, it’s seldom dull, and from a purely technical standpoint, rather skillfully put together. Approached in a certain frame of mind, MB can be immensely entertaining. And maybe there’s a certain ironic justice at work in that, for all its supposedly chaotic production disasters and the subsequent critical savaging it received, the creators of Myra may well have gotten in the last word after all. Today it’s considered a bona fide cult classic and has a devoted, if small, following, and as a result its reputation steadily increases with the passage of time.
The film’s legendary haphazard production history actually gives us some, perhaps unintended, aesthetic benefits as the bumpy narrative plays with our expectations, then frustrates them. To wit, as Myra in most leisurely fashion gives our stud Rusty his physical exam, we suspect it will culminate in a more or less conventional sexual encounter, and thus her wild ride-the-bronc scene is all the more effective because it’s so unexpected (and, it must be admitted, shockingly over-the-top in its bad taste). Another element of unexpectedness is that the scene also reverses (is that the word?) the usual woman-on-top configuration. Other felicitous results are the Golden Age film clips interspersed, albeit somewhat jarringly, throughout. There’s also the Myra/Mary Ann quasi-lesbian encounter, which teases us with affectionate moments, but never goes all the way to the Sapphic heart of the matter (it seems that Mary Ann was just too reluctant, probably because she was straight). For all that the scene is sensitively and beautifully done, it’s a pale shadow of the Cynthia Myers/Erica Gavin steamy encounters in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which are far superior in their titillating depiction and resultant emotional impact.
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| "OK, boys. Get your resumes out" |
Speaking of Mae West, I’ve never been much of a fan. To me there was always a one-note quality to her saucy persona. But here, as the man-eating agent Leticia Van Allen, she’s just right. She seems to be having a great time essaying what’s basically a parody of herself. What’s more she just looks great: actually I think she’s sexier in MB than in her glory days in the early Thirties.
One unexpected pleasure was a cameo by the usually virtuous William Hopper of Perry Mason fame. In MB he’s cast against type as a far right (and eminently hypocritical, corrupted and corruptible) judge. Quite the send-up of the ultra-conservative political views of his mother, the infamous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Whatever the context, the joy of seeing Hopper is tinged with a certain sadness as he died in 1970 at the age of fifty-four, just a few months before MB’s release. It was his last film and as such a somewhat inglorious end to a solid if under-appreciated career.
The real revelation of Myra Breckinridge is Raquel Welch. In the title role she delivers the performance of a career, and we get a glimpse of just how good an actress she was. It serves as a bittersweet reminder of the career that might have been had she been taken seriously as an actress and not always typecast as a sex bomb [4].
As for my somewhat superfluous ‘best movies of all time’ second ten, what can be said? I seem to be on a best/most kick these days, and I thought another list wouldn’t hurt. It might have been out of a sense of frustration that, in compiling my original top ten, indeed I had to limit the list to ten titles. Ergo a second ten. Actually numbers eleven to twenty might be a more accurate description. Readers will note that I’ve fudged a bit and included ties this time around. So be it. Anyhow drumroll please, here they are, more or less in chronological order:
tie: Metropolis, M
Olympia
The Seventh Victim
Les Enfants du Paradis
Meshes of the Afternoon
The Red Shoes
tie: The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura
The Naked Kiss
tie: Death in Venice, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Blade Runner
[1] The original Valley of the Dolls, that is, not the ‘Beyond’ version. More on that film in the post above. By the way both Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley are discussed elsewhere in these pages.
[2] Indeed it seems I’m not alone in conflating the two camp/trash classics, as over the years it’s not been uncommon for theaters to screen Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a double feature.
[3] Part of the explanation may be that Dolls was helmed by Russ Meyer, who was probably just a better director than Michael Sarne. Another possibility is that Meyer may have been given a freer hand by the studio.
[4] In a case of MB paralleling Dolls again, Hollywood also missed the boat on Cynthia Myers, not as good an actress as Raquel Welch by a long shot but her equal in sex appeal and screen charisma. Another instance of a career that might have been.
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