In the episode of AMC's Backstory included as one of the special features on the surprisingly thorough Myra Breckinridge DVD, it quickly becomes apparent that everyone involved in the X-rated adaptation of Gore Vidal's transgressive, gender-bending satirical novel thought they were making a different movie. It's fitting that the DVD's two audio commentaries seem to be commenting on two wildly divergent films.
In one of those commentaries, Myra Breckinridge star Raquel Welch treats the film the way a parent might treat a child who grew up to become a serial killer: with a mixture of shame, horror, revulsion, and disbelief that she was ever involved. At her bitchiest, she even compares co-star and dueling diva Mae West to a dock-worker in drag. But where Welch sees a train wreck marred by on-set clashes, an inexperienced and drug-addled director, and an incoherent script, writer-director Michael Sarne inexplicably sees a daring, visionary masterpiece featuring Welch's all-time best performance. (Though, considering her career, that's decidedly faint praise.)
Not surprisingly, the notorious flop itself validates Welch's opinion while only showing intermittent flashes of the revolutionary, Fellini-esque comedy Sarne is still convinced he made. A product of its permissive, self-indulgent times, the 1970 film casts critic Rex Reed as a voyeuristic dreamer who undergoes a sex change in Europe and becomes the title character in the form of Welch, the busty embodiment of Old Hollywood glamour. John Huston and Mae West round out the overqualified cast, the former as Welch/Reed's screen-cowboy uncle and the proprietor of an unconventional acting school, the latter as an oversexed agent/singer.
In what's easily the least-warranted display of arrogance this side of Joe Eszterhas' autobiography, Sarne insists that Myra Breckinridge is both a voyeuristic gay movie-lover's Hollywood fantasia of power and perversity, and an ostensibly heterosexual broad drag comedy about a man who wants to be a woman. The widely derided film fails as both, though it's a lot more compelling to think about as a cinephile's wet dream than as an unfunny, gratingly over-the-top comedy.
Reed gives Myra Breckinridge's most effective performance, lending pathos as a sad little non-actor outsider living out his celluloid dreams as a Golden Age siren. Dishing out casual homophobia with his gross egotism, Sarne insists that transsexuals and gays are essentially pathetic, deluded creatures whose campy façades hide deep reservoirs of shame. He even goes so far as to call Vidal and Reed "screaming fags" pathetically pretending to be straight. While his comment seems attributable largely to personal prejudices and grudges, the sadness in Reed's performance provides one of the only elements in the film that ring true. The DVD features a riveting human drama of egos run amok, vicious fights, and conflicting agendas. Unfortunately, the really fascinating stuff happened offscreen.