In a Vanity Fair piece on the making of this film, director Michael Sarne makes some of the least convincing arguments in defence of his own lack of talent – “I didn’t really want to make the film”, “the producer was an idiot”, “the preview in San Francisco in front of a gay audience went really well”. Rex Reed would later take Sarne to task but his performance – clearly cut about as it is - is poor. Raquel Welch tries but she’s simply not up to it – although she does look pretty in a variety of outfits.
Gore Vidal’s novel was never going to be easy to adapt but this is a fair mess – characters and subplots come and go, it lacks rhyme or reason, the cutting in of old Fox movies (something Julien Temple loved doing) gets irritating after a while. Anal rape may have been liberating (or something) in the late 60s but now it just comes across as unpleasant.
Still, there’s no denying the film has its fascination: Mae West’s return to the big screen (some of her lines are actually funny and she sings a version of ‘Hard to Handle’ – Mae West doing a dong later covered by The Black Crowes!); early performances from Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck (both poor – Fawcett doesn’t even go through with a lesbian love scene with Welch); John Carradine saying “tits”; John Huston.
NB To understand how this got through the system you have to remember it was a time when sure fire projects like Hello Dolly were crashing, and sleepers like The Graduate and Easy Rider were raking in the dough. Shutting your eyes and hoping for the best also resulted in MASH for the same studio, so there is something to be said for this method of filmmaking.
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