Cine-Trash

Myra Breckinridge (1970)
by William Ham

There were strange rumblings in Tinseltown ’round about the late ’60s, and it wasn’t San Andreas’ fault. The introduction of the MPAA’s rating system, combined with the introduction of psychedelics into the mouths of directors and studio execs, opened the floodgates for some truly bizarre filmic flip-outs. I’m not just talking Psych-Out or The Trip here; I mean chromosomally-damaged Technicolor yawns like Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, and anything that Liz Taylor and Richard Burton did after Virginia Woolf. But Myra Breckinridge, based (very loosely) on Gore Vidal’s novel and often cited as one of the worst movies ever made, holds its own special place among their company. How could any picture featuring Rex (the poor man’s Oscar Wilde) Reed as a milquetoast who becomes Raquel Welch after a sex-change not stand alone? This story of one transsexual’s course of vengeance against masculinity has everything you could wish for in an exquisitely horrendous film: positively surreal casting (John Huston, a young Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck, and the very old Mae West, in addition to Rex ‘n’ Raquel), utterly reprehensible values (’30s-style racism and timeless sexism), and a couple of truly frightening set-pieces. I’m not sure which is worse – the extended sequence where Myra (who kept a crucial, ah, piece of equipment from her pre-op days) buggers a macho pig, or the sight of Mae West “singing” “Hot to Handle” (later covered by the Black Crowes) in her own, mercifully inimitable style. I doubt that even the libertines of the hippie era knew what to make of this at the time, but from this vantage point it seems quite clear what this is: The casting, the dream-like amorphousness, and the liberal use of old film clips fall together like a trip into the darkest corners of the dying subconscious of old Hollywood. In the transition from the repressive Hays-code era to the modern anything-goes film world, Myra Breckinridge was the Rubicon that had to be crossed.