#99 Myra Breckinridge (Wes)

#99 Myra Breckinridge

Before we started this list I’d never heard of this film. I’m sure that many of you reading this won’t have heard of this either, and I’m sorry to you that I’ve killed a small piece of your innocence by making you aware of it’s existence.

Based on a Gore Vidal novel, the film revolves around a film buff, Myron Breckinridge, who gets a sex change to become Myra Breckinridge (Raquel Welch). Claiming to be Myron’s widow, she goes to her Uncle Buck Loner (John Huston), who owns an acting school, and demands inheritance money from him. Buck tries to avoid giving her any money, and gives her a job at his acting school whilst fobbing her off. That’s pretty much it really. Except that it also stars Mae West as a sex obsessed old lady for some reason.

Now I’m sure that the book this was based on is witty, this movie however is not. The sex jokes (and that’s all this movie is, a sexual farce), are actually on a level lower that the Confessions of a….. series. The funniest thing in this movie was a clip from an old Laurel and Hardy film. Surely that’s one of the golden rules of film making; If you’re making a movie don’t put in clips from far better movies. It would be like George Lucas putting clips of The Empire Strikes Back into the Star Wars prequels, all it does is highlight exactly what’s missing from your movie.

There seems to be some good ideas in this movie, but the director (Michael Sarne)just doesn't have the skill to pull them off and ultimately the movie just looks like it was made by a second rate film student. The use of old movie clips to narrate the story could have been quite funny/clever (and was when it was done by the 90s sitcom Dream On), but they're used to much and it just distracts from what is actually happening. So much so that you start to wonder if the studio wanted a longer movie and this was Sarne's only way of achieving this.

If anything this movie will remain infamous for having the first scene of pegging ever to appear in a movie (actually a female on male rape scene). So as a movie it pushed boundaries (this also shows in the fact that it’s the two female leads who are the main sexual predators, tossing aside their conquests as soon as they’re finished with them), but this doesn’t make up for all its failings.

Mae West actually came out of retirement to make this movie and you wonder why she bothered. The script is just painfully bad, Mae’s lines being amongst the worst, and seeing her deliver such awful sexual innuendos is just cringe-worthy. Not nearly as painful to watch as her singing Hard to Handle though (check it out on YouTube, you seriously can’t imagine how bad it really is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD1hdlLQXkc).

Overall this is a pretty confused movie. It seems to lack any cohesive direction and spends too much of it’s time trying to either be a lot cleverer than it is, or just trying to shock it’s audience. Raquel Welch gives a decent performance, but sadly her best acting still isn’t brilliant. All I can conclude from all of this is that Myra Breckinridge would be a lot higher up on this list if people had actually heard of it.