Glen or Glenda

Comment: After experiencing "Plan 9 From Outer Space", I was interested in seeing more of Ed Wood's.....creations. PBS happened to be showing "Glen Or Glenda" one night. I decided to tune in. Long after the movie was over, I still sat there with my mouth hanging open, staring at the TV in utter amazement. This movie....this movie has to be seen to be believed. It is so stupifyingly bad that it's a real classic. It's like a prehistoric LSD trip in black & white. Especially the part when all of the people are at the apartment (along with the devil) tormenting Glen/Glenda. Some people slowly appear out of nowhere, others pop in instantaneously. This movie is so crudely surreal that it's almost frightening to watch. What the heck was Wood, or Daniel Davis, as he called himself, thinking when he made this?? Or, more precisely, what was he tripping on? This is one of those movies that is so bad that it must be seen by everyone. Amazing. On the flip side, Bela Lugosi managed to put in a half-way decent performance despite the material that he had to work with. 'Pull zee string...' indeed. Just like another reviewer said: Poor Bela.

Comment: So I bought this movie because I thought it'd be campy fun. Instead, what a surprise it was to find a 1950's movie from Ed Wood that was risque, daring, and thoughtful.

In the 1950s or 60s or 70s, cross-dressers, gays, and other 'deviants' were NEVER portrayed as either sympathetic characters or as being in any way normal. Yet, Ed Wood, drawing from his own life, with support from his friends and associates, made a movie about men whose sexuality was DIFFERENT, yet who were otherwise quite typical people - the mailman, the steel worker, the soldier, the guy who works for the electric company. The struggle Glen goes through to tell his fiance about his cross-dressing will certainly be a familiar one to anyone who's had a coming-out story of their own. Wood got the emotions spot-on right.

There are sequences in this movie of overt sexuality, sexual fantasy, and s&m - This from a time when Ricky and Lucy slept in separate beds!

Yeah, the acting is stilted, the stock footage is inane, the camera work is often jarring, and the narration technique is dated.

But, y'know what? This is a landmark motion picture. Really.

Comment: I'm not sure why I watched this again recently. I was rewatching movies about Hollywood, getting through SUNSET BOULEVARD and Blake Edwards' S.O.B., I put in a few minutes of Tim Burton's ED WOOD before the heavy reality snuffed out the fun of it all....

Then I wondered: was GLEN OR GLENDA really that bad?

Yes. And more. Or worse, depending on how you measure these things.

If you know nothing about Ed Wood and his inept film career, you will be completely lost and mystified by how bad this movie is. Even if you understand Wood and his career, GLEN OR GLENDA is astonishingly bad in so many ways. You will see transvestites in the 1950s, along with Bela Lugosi, stock footage of stampeding buffalo, and Satan. Behind it all is a disjointed script justifying cross-dressing while inserting bizarre sequences where unidentified women tie each other up or rip their clothes off themselves. And then Satan shows up to do stuff.

Wow. It's bad. It's beyond bad, which is probably why it's survived. I don't think anyone could have TRIED to make a worse movie. Anyone who's studied psychology should have fun with this as well as those who enjoy really, really bad filmmaking.

"PULL THE STRING! PULL THE STRING!"

Comment: In my opinion, this is the worst movie ever made. Plan 9 From Outer Space is like Lawrence Of Arabia compared to Glen or Glenda. I gave it 2 stars because Bela Lugosi's parts are funny. Starts with Bela in a laboratory making some ridiculous Ed Wood speech containing classic quotes as "MAN IS WRONG BECAUSE HE DOES RIGHT. RIGHT BECAUSE HE DOES WRONG! PULL DA STRINGS!" Then the film is all over the place with stock footage, Wood dressed in women clothes, etc. Some whiney voice saying "If the creator wanted us to fly, he'd given us wings." I don't get this movie. I think it might be Ed Wood trying to describe his subconscious on film? I dunno. If you can get through all 70 minutes of this you can get through anything. And those stupid newspaper headlines. There is nothing like this movie. Worth watching once.

Comment: "Write what you know," goes the adage.

Applying that sage admonition to heart, noir B-cinema savant Ed Wood concocted his sole masterpiece, a crossdressing confession / fantasy that remains, half a century later, the supremest TS call-to-arms.

Employing a disciplined narrative not discerned in his freakier (and more notoriously renowned) fare, Wood kicks off with high transtragic drama, then aims his ideological agenda sharply at God and mankind, then proceeds to dramatize the anguish - and humanity - of the TS experience. "Mistakes are made [in nature]" and technology (SRS) can correct this particular one, Wood first states - then muses that surgery would not be necessary if society would simply loosen up. Very modern!

The ensuing "dream sequence" - a pseudoballet of opium poetry spiced up with crowdpleasing sex kicks - leads to the film's denouement, and what a hotter it is! To Wood's credit, the theatrical tension is so sublime that anticipating the payoff is neigh impossible. (Actually, two very different endings were filmed.)

Crude, cheap, didactic - sure - but right on, and uncannily beautiful, too.