After undergoing gender reassignment surgery, an aspiring actress travels to Hollywood, where she also wants to make a claim on her wealthy uncle's estate.
Director: Michael Sarne
Stars: Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett.
Ralph Beaumont ... choreographer
Watched online, blurry.
17 songs in the Soundtracks, most only partially performed, several in vintage film clips.
MW's penultimate film. Here she does look her age (b. 1893), but still walks with her signature sashay. Her role here is small, totally disproportionate to her billing. She sings 2 songs, and in the production number, the film focuses on other characters who are talking.
Rated 5 on 2015-05-07, I remembered unfavorably the scene where RW rapes the man via a strap-on, and speculated that might be the reason for the 5. So I tried it again, and still found that scene horribly repulsive. However, the rest of the film is more of a fascinating train wreck.
The synopsis above mostly misses the point of the film: Myra/Myron is out to change the world by attacking sex roles, hoping to reduce population growth and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Since s/he reveres the films of '35-'45, s/he decides to teach at an acting academy to influence future sex role portrayal in film. (The fact that it's a sham academy, with students who're highly unlikely to become stars in mainstream film, seems lost.) She's also pursuing the cash she feels the uncle owes her, but the socio-political thing is of equal or higher importance.
We get lots of clips of vintage Fox films. The Connections page lists even more than I remember seeing, but if you don't focus on the screen all the time, you can easily miss them. They're used to reveal or emphasize what a character in this film is thinking/feeling. Or to add to the absurdity.
The IMDb trivia says the film strays from the original book, but in reading the synopsis of the book on Wikipedia, it seems we get less of the original negative plot involving MW, and a different ending, but otherwise essentially the same. (The book's ending is what I anticipated just before the final scene. In some ways the film ending is better.)
I've ordered what I hope is the British dvd with commentary. I might append to this when I've watched that.
Fox, dir. Sarne; 6-
