Tuesday morning in the wee small hours, Fox Movie Channel is airing the 1970 movie, Myra Breckenridge, starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed as each other, and John Houston and Mae West trying to see which of them can do a better job of making you forget the good things they were once involved with. It's not Skidoo…but it's close.
The film is a fascinating relic of a period in the movie industry when the folks in charge were largely clueless about what they should be making in order to compete with television. A few years earlier, the consensus in some quarters had been that the only thing movies could offer than you couldn't get on the small screen was the big screen. Some predicted that soon, every film would be on the grand scale of Ben-Hur or Cleopatra and that instead of making a lot of small-to-medium budget movies each year, the majors would collectively produce perhaps a dozen huge-budget flicks. As some of those huge-budget flicks flopped, execs learned the danger of putting all of one's eggs in a lone basket and began pondering how else they might draw viewers from their homes and into theaters.
The other obvious thing movies could offer than TV couldn't was more adult fare but the major studios were too conservative to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. As a result, we had this period when they were making half-assed, clumsy attempts to be adult without offending the masses. At the same time, Newsweek told them there was this "youth movement" on in the country — it may have had something to do with some war in Asia at the time — and since teens and young adults go on dates (i.e., buy movie tickets), there was this massive attempt to pander to them, mostly made by people who hadn't a clue how to do that. That's how we got things like Skidoo and The Strawberry Statement and Vanishing Point and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Some were good, some weren't but they all gave off these odd pheromones of someone clumsily trying to appeal to an audience they didn't understand.
I dunno what they thought the audience was for Myra Breckenridge but it turned out to be people who wanted to go laugh at how awful a movie could be. The reviews were dreadful and it didn't help matters that Rex Reed wrote a lengthy article for Playboy that soundly trashed the writer-director as incompetent and unable to even shoot the movie he'd set out to make. (As opposed to Skidoo where, I gather, Otto Preminger made exactly the movie he envisioned and it still didn't make a lick of sense.)
To see Myra Breckenridge is to feel sorry for everyone involved. Mae West sure didn't deserve that as her next-to-last movie (didn't deserve her last one, Sextette, either but there she mostly had herself to blame). I am not suggesting you watch this and I'm not even including a link to buy the DVD because you definitely don't want to do that. But you should know that it's there, if only so you can step gingerly around it.