Myra Breckenridge (1970)

          The notorious flop Myra Breckenridge tries so hard to be outrageous that, after a while, it’s just boring to watch even though the storyline is a sensationalistic farce about a scheming transsexual. Based on a satirical novel by Gore Vidal, the picture follows Myron Breckenridge (Rex Reed) as he undergoes sex-change surgery to become Myra Breckenridge (Raquel Welch) in order to get revenge on his skeevy uncle, Buck Loner (John Huston), who swindled Myron’s inheritance.
          Throughout the picture, Welch interacts with other performers while Reed lurks on the sidelines, visible only to Welch as his/her character’s inner voice. (This device allows Reed to issue caustic commentary and to guide Welch through her underhanded machinations.) As if more weirdness was necessary, director Michael Sarne regularly cuts from the action to snippets from old Twentieth Century-Fox movies (think Laurel & Hardy, Shirley Temple, and so on), providing “ironic” counterpoints to the main story.

          Putting the whole thing way over the top is the casting of onetime sex symbol Mae West as a talent agent who gets embroiled in the story; ancient and overweight but glamorized as if her former sex appeal is still intact, West floats through the movie in outlandish costumes, dropping rude one-liners and singing a pair of horrible show tunes. Huston’s contribution to the strangeness is performing in cartoonish cowboy costumes (his ten-gallon hat features a brim that must be four feet across) and barking every line in a lascivious growl. Reed, the flamboyant film critic whose claim to fame in the ’60s and ’70s was jaded bitchiness, contributes absolutely nothing except jaded bitchiness. As for Welch, the allure of her spectacular beauty wears thin once she starts acting, since she delivers dialogue with a vapid breathiness that makes her sound like a posturing twit.

          Still, Myra Breckenridge is among the most brazen X-rated movies from the brief moment when studios actually made X-rated movies. The raunchiest scene is undoubtedly Myra’s sexual conquest of a young stud (Roger Herren), because she ties him to a table, straps on a dildo, and anally rapes him while hooting and hollering like she’s riding in a rodeo. (The scene is shot discreetly, but the content is nonetheless startling.) In another transgressive moment, Myron (who is actually Myra imagining that he/she is still Myron) pleasures himself while imagining a pretty girl (Farrah Fawcett) tempting him with ice cream and baked goods.

          Myra Breckenridge had a dour effect on the professional lives of nearly everyone involved, destroying Carne’s Hollywood career, dissuading Reed from acting again until his cameo in Superman (1978), and dashing Welch’s hopes of being taken seriously as an actress. Some many find this movie’s mannered excesses amusing in a campy sort of way, and Myra Breckenridge is a must-see for anyone cataloging the worst cinematic train wrecks of the ’70s, but the picture doesn’t come close to being the scandalous farce its makers obviously envisioned.

Myra Breckenridge: FREAKY

Sextette (1978)

          If there’s one scene that epitomizes the spellbinding strangeness of Sextette, a big-budget musical comedy that’s both tone-deaf and completely unfunny, it’s an extended romantic duet between the heroine and the younger man she just married. The leading lady is none other than Mae West, the notorious actress/writer who first achieved fame in the 1920s for scandalous stage shows. The bridegroom is played by Englishman Timothy Dalton, a decade before his brief run as 007. At the time, West was 84 and Dalton was 32, yet the scene features the actors sharing vocal chores (and they are chores, since neither can sing) on a lifeless, quasi-disco version of the Captain and Tennille hit “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

          Dalton’s a slim young man wearing an elegant tux, and West is an overweight senior hidden behind gallons of makeup, acres of Edith Head-designed sequined costuming, and a haze filter thick enough to trigger a smog alert. At the most ludicrous moment of this sequence, Dalton sings the laughably re-written lyric, “Young and beautiful, your looks will never be gone.” The camera then cuts to a close-up (shot from about 20 feet away) of West writhing seductively, her looks very much gone.

          And that’s pretty much the tone of this whole excruciating picture, which features an old-fashioned lark of a plot about legions of men lusting after West’s character, Marlo Manners. Marlo is a Hollywood movie star who just married her sixth husband, Great Britain’s Lord Barrington (Dalton). Their honeymoon is being celebrated by the public and documented by the media as a major event, but before the duo can (shudder) consummate their union, Marlo’s agent (Dom DeLuise) says the U.S. government wants Marlo to seduce a foreign leader (Tony Curtis) into cooperating with an international peace initiative. Meanwhile, Marlo’s fifth husband, gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton), has resurfaced despite everyone believing him dead, and he’s intent on reclaiming Marlo’s hand.

          Also thrown into the mix are a fey fashion designer (played by The Who drummer Keith Moon), an imperious Russian film director (played by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr), real-life broadcasters Rona Barrett and Regis Philbin (as themselves), and cameo players Walter Pidgeon and George Raft. Oh, and shock-rocker Alice Cooper shows up at the end, without his trademark ghoul make-up, to (quite effectively) croon a number as a singing waiter.

          This whole mess is based upon the last play West wrote, also called Sextette, and because the play opened in 1961, questions of “why” are unavoidable. Why was a film adaptation deemed necessary almost 20 years after the play opened? Why was a West comeback deemed necessary, more than 30 years after her last starring role in a movie? And why the hell didn’t anyone realize how wrong all of this was? Answers to these puzzlers are lost to the ages, so we’re merely left with a cinematic curio. Sextette is filled with images that would be innocuous in other circumstances but are mind-warpingly bizarre given West’s advanced age: a roomful of bodybuilders flexing their muscles to curry West’s favor; a roomful of diplomats (including a stand-in for then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter) singing and dancing as West holds them in her thrall; West cooing sexual puns as she lounges in bed and drives men like Curtis, Dalton, and Hamilton to erotic distraction.

          West’s performance is abysmal, since she tries to mimic the sass of bygone days without acknowledging the passage of time; the poor woman looks close to toppling when she tries to shimmy in tight dresses. About the only good thing one can say about Sextette is that even though much of the dialogue recycles past favorites (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime,” and so on), West had not completely lost her flair for penning ribald one-liners, like this zinger: “I’m the girl who works for Paramount all day, and Fox all night.”

Sextette: FREAKY