Adapted from Gore Vidal's best–selling novel, Myra Breckinridge may be the most maligned movie in American history. The story of a homosexual film critic who undergoes a sex change and moves to Hollywood to orchestrate a realignment of the sexes was received with fear and loathing by virtually all reviewers. "We might as well slit our throats, if it's come to this," Life gasped, singling out the movie for attack in a July 4 editorial. Myra Breckinridge besmirched, even as it fetishized, Hollywood. Considering that its first dramatic sequence is a public castration, that a later scene-revealing the heroine's absent penis-makes a cowboy and his lawyer faint, and that mod director Michael Sarne was driven from Hollywood never to return, it seems amazing that Myra has yet to be recuperated by film theorists.