Myra Breckinridge (1970)
Directed by Michael Sarne
Myron Breckinridge flies to Europe to get a sex-change operation and is transformed into the beautiful Myra. She travels to Hollywood, meets up with her rich Uncle Buck and, claiming to be Myron's widow, demands money. Instead, Buck gives Myra a job in his acting school. There, Myra meets aspiring actor Rusty and his girlfriend, Mary Ann. With Myra as catalyst, the trio begin to outrageously expand their sexual horizons.
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7 films that influenced Myra Breckinridge
What critics say influenced Myra Breckinridge
If Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion effects are hardly a career pinnacle (director Don Chaffey extracted more personality from the work of Harryhausen in Jason and the Argonauts), a moment in which a pterodactyl snatches up Loana (Welch) in its claws only to drop her in a lake handily encapsulates Harryhausen's not-isolated ability to lift the film out of tedium--and the tendency for every time his creatures disappear to be a rude awakening indeed.
A remake of Hal Roach's b&w One Million B.C. and the clearer precursor of the two to Jean-Jacques Annaud's fabulous Quest for Fire, what with its characterization of nascent classism now colour-coded, the Hammer production also takes a page from Bert I. Gordon in unleashing prehistoric monsters on civilization and yet manages even less credibility than your average Gordon concoction by turning his freak-of-nature beasties into a mere anachronism: "The Flintstones" be damned, cavemen and dinosaurs never got the chance to interact.
And while it's not nearly so good as McLaglen/Stewart's devastating Civil War idyll Shenandoah, Bandolero! is still better than it probably should be, saved by its above-the-line talent.
The violence is surprising (though nothing compared to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, which would redefine the standard of bloodshed in American cinema a few months later), with the body count uncompromisingly high even as the death scenes retain that old-school tradition of rank ham.
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Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle ( Once Upon a Time in the West ) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead.
Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle ( Once Upon a Time in the West ) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead.
Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle ( Once Upon a Time in the West ) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead.