Raquel Welch's passing in 2023 makes it timely for a documentary overview of her life and her impact as a cultural icon and the last of the "old school" Hollywood Sex Symbols who came out of the studio system. Unfortunately this one, while filled with valuable insights is done in by a problem with so many documentaries of the last two decades and that's the obsession with dispensing with a narrator and having only interview subjects in effect tell us the story. The problem is this leads to too much chattering from people whose only connection to Raquel was appearing with them in one project and the other problem is that when you have too many talking heads, you hear the same points beaten to death. And in the meantime, newcomers to Raquel's story end up not learning one word about some critical details of her life, especially the matter of her four marriages.
Her first marriage to Jim Welch, her high school sweetheart and the father of her two children Damon (who is seen) and Tahnee (who isn't) gets some necessary attention but strangely, the film seems to treat her decision to in effect walk out on the marriage to pursue her dreams of stardom as a positive thing. If they'd bothered to read her memoir "Beyond The Cleavage" they'd find Raquel confessing that her decision to leave was the most painful decision of her life and that "for the sake of the children I should have stayed." She was candid enough to admit that valiant as she was in raising her two children on her own, she deprived them of a normal upbringing that caused problems for them and it caused scars. Failing to acknowledge this admission of hers makes the film come off as less than honest and incomplete when telling Raquel's story.
As for Raquel's subsequent marriages, the viewer learns nothing. Photographs shown in this narrator-free presentation occasionally identify "Patrick Curtis" and "Andre Weinfeld" without ever identifying them as her second and third husbands. Raquel's tragic miscarriage at age 42 after she did "Woman Of The Year" is never mentioned either. Her final husband Richie Palmer is seen among the talking heads yet there is not a word from him about how they came to be married or why it failed. That Raquel, who was the most desired of women on the planet for a long time by millions of men never found long-term true love with anyone is another facet of her life that at the very least requires some acknowledgment in a comprehensive treatment of her life.
The film does acknowledge how Raquel clashed with extreme feminists but they try to have it both ways by insisting she was still a feminist. All well and good but they might have at least acknowledged how in later years Raquel was overly critical of the increased coarsening of society and how the allure of being sexy had been replaced by overt brazenness. And in her final decades she had in fact returned to her Christian faith of her upbringing and was a regular churchgoer in Glendale. That too was as much a part of her story and her life that merited a mention in showing the irony of how a woman who seemed to be the picture of the swinging sexual revolution of the 60s was in the end quite traditional in her instincts.
And that in a sense is the real secret to Raquel Welch's iconic quality. The fact that she could be so empowering and sexy and at the same time exude an aura of underlying decency about her that also enabled her to survive the slings and arrows that came from being a sex symbol that Marilyn Monroe had never been able to handle. She lived a full life and overcame the obstacles and for that she is to be admired. This documentary, while doing a good job in telling part of her story (her being forced to suppress her Latina heritage and identity. Today, she would have been able to proudly be Raquel Tejada from the get-go), is not the definitive telling it could have been.
