The climactic scene of Michael Sarne’s “Myra Breckinridge” could belong to a game of Clue: Great Hollywood Follies Edition — Raquel Welch, in the nurse’s office, with a sex toy. In the indelible moment, Ms. Welch, as a whirlwind acting teacher and would-be gender revolutionary, clad in a star-spangled bikini, unveils new horizons to an all-American hayseed-turned-budding thespian. Fueled by Gore Vidal’s rambunctious source novel, the 1970 film was a studio production aiming to shock and subvert, and the result was a treat for gawkers of 1960s camp. Thirty-eight years after its premiere, New Yorkers can watch the oddity firsthand in a new print this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

“Myra Breckinridge” picks up where the likes of Otto Preminger’s “Skidoo” and “Candy” (another adaptation, from Terry Southern’s picaresque) left off — which, one might fairly ask, is where, exactly? The rough idea among bewildered producers at the time seemed to be that the canniest response to the groovy ’60s zeitgeist was wild ‘n’ crazy satire starring an embarrassing miscegenation of fresh young things and screen icons you weren’t sure were still alive.

“Myra Breckinridge,” a latecomer to the party, privileges sex over the drug revolution, and is ever so slightly elevated by Mr. Vidal’s pretensions, but it compensates for its lack of psychedelia with a hallucinogenic co-billing. Joining Ms. Welch, who might have known better after appearing in Southern’s “The Magic Christian,” was 1930s vaudeville-born sexpot performer-gag writer Mae West. Here, age 76, she’s looking for man-flesh as a casting agent with admirable, unstinting innuendo.

The plot of “Myra” is, like its climax, by turns awful and awe-inspiring, and bursting with fodder for a thousand febrile seminar papers. Myra (Ms. Welch) begins life as Myron, initially played by the film critic Rex Reed; a set piece sex-change scene makes the switch, in the sub-Fellini setting of an operating theater with applauding audience and a desultory whip-master for atmosphere. Myra, to whom Myron continues to appear and speak, then begins her erudite and erotic assault on a pitiful acting school headed by her Uncle Buck (John Huston in full-on drawl and 100-gallon hat, and introduced atop a stuffed horse). Myra’s subversive techniques as a new teacher at the school, part of a bid for the Westwood land that hosts its campus, consist of a constant stream of revisionist film criticism and the seduction first of heartland doofus Rusty (Roger Herren) and then, tamely, his girlfriend (Farrah Fawcett in her Hollywood debut). None of it is explicit, although, like “Midnight Cowboy,” which is referenced at one point, “Myra” was originally rated X. Myra’s breathless deconstruction of cinema is treated partly as a joke, partly with perplexed titillation, and tends toward glossed-over double-take pronouncements (“Masculinity died with Burt Lancaster in ‘Vera Cruz'”).

But the film’s lurid enactment of a changing of the guard in Hollywood is grotesquely fascinating (even though Mr. Sarne, its forgotten director, was no harbinger of genius). Besides Myra’s pronouncements on cinema, the film hiccups regularly with inserted clips from black-and-white Hollywood movies from the 1930s and ’40s. These clips comment on the proceedings, a little like the ones used in the ’90s HBO boomer dramedy “Dream On,” and perhaps inspired by a similar technique in William Friedkin’s 1968 film “The Night They Raided Minsky’s.”

Of course, in “Myra,” commentary tends toward using a Laurel and Hardy gag about an endless wooden plank for a joke about penis size. But there’s a jolt to seeing Laurel and Hardy or “The Mask of Zorro” deployed — along with the whole Cinemascoped production might of 20th Century Fox — for a movie in which Ms. Welch tears off her undergarments to prove her new parts to a lawyer. Hollywood nostalgists might laugh to keep from crying, but one thing that’s always well-preserved is hyperbolic movie-bomb mythos.

But all this leaves the best for last, as West might say, though she’d make it sound dirty. As queen of the casting couch Leticia Van Allen, West leers at rows of aspirant young bucks (including a green Tom Selleck) and savors lines she might have liked to deliver onscreen decades earlier. Costumed specially by Edith Head and encased in makeup or some species of preservative that renders her face a peaked waxen death mask, West presides over her own musical numbers, including a funk ditty. In her way, she’s one of the more inspiring bits of taboo-taunting here (and it wasn’t even her last bow: See 1978’s “Sextette” opposite Timothy Dalton). Still, as a critic once wrote of Preminger’s “Skidoo,” this all inevitably sounds more interesting than it plays.

There’s time aplenty to ponder the infinite during the woeful swipes at acting-school airs and the hippie-establishment bits that include a mad judge (freely ripping off Mandrake of “Dr. Strangelove”) who, ho ho ho, smokes grass on the sly. Fortunately, much of the cast would see better days, and “Myra” endures as a vivid, convenient death rattle before the scruffy New Hollywood mob rode in to install its own legends. Mr. Vidal, however, wouldn’t be so lucky: Capping the decade would be a star-studded adaptation of another novel, a production from which he eventually excised his name, the ignominious “Caligula.”

Through March 9 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).