#97 Glen or Glenda (Wes)

#97 Glen or Glenda

This is the first Ed Wood movie that we come cross in our list and like all of his movies it has a certain charm. That doesn’t mean that it’s a great movie, but it does mean that at least it’s entertaining to watch, unlike some of the movies that have been (or will be) watched on this list.

The film is narrated by psychiatrist Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) as he tells the story of transvestite Glen (Ed Wood himself under the name Daniel Davis) and his bid to be accepted in his life as Glenda. This mainly revolves around the difficulties that Glen faces when telling his fiancée Barbara (Dolores Fuller) about his cross-dressing. The second part of the movie deals with Alan (Tommy Haynes), who under goes gender assignment surgery to become Anne. It plays more like a public information movie, telling its viewers that men who dress in women’s clothing are neither homosexuals nor weirdo’s. Basically this is a semi-autobiographical movie, which comes across as a plea for understanding for the trans community from a homophobic 1950s America.

The film opens with Bela Lugosi playing a Baron Frankenstein style mad scientist (or perhaps God?) who has to deal with the usual baffling script that Wood provided. How he delivers lines like “People. All going somewhere. All with their own thoughts, their own ideas, All with their own personalities. One is wrong because he does right. One is right because he does wrong. PULL THE STRING. Dance to that!” with his usual panache is nothing short of miraculous. This however is done with great use of a split screen, so this helps him look like a god like creator, rather than a man with no trousers shouting at pigeons in the local park. However as the film progresses further and Lugosi crops up again and again you just get confused as to what he’s actually doing in the movie.

But it’s not only Lugosi that has ludicrous lines to say, the script in general is terrible. When the story of Glen starts, it features papers with “shocking” headlines such as “WORLD SHOCKED BY SEX CHANGE” and “Man Nabbed Dressed as Girl”, this is followed by two funny voiced voice-overs telling us how aeroplanes and “au-ti-mobiles” were once the subject of derision. As an example as to why people shouldn’t be shocked by sex changes then it’s certainly inventive. Later on in the movie, seemingly just to narrate yet more stock footage (this movie contains a LOT of that), the lines “The world is a strange place to live in. All those cars, all going someplace, all carrying humans, which are carrying out their lives.” are spoken by Dr. Alton. If anybody can actually tell me the relevance of these words, then I’d appreciate it.

The acting as you’d expect is mostly dreadful, surprisingly the one actor who gives an OK performance is Wood himself. Seeing as though much of Woods performance involves swanning around in angora sweaters, it could be fair to argue that he didn’t do too much in the way of acting though. A few of the other actors went on to star in other Wood movies, so you pretty much know what to expect if you’ve seen any of those.

The strangest moment in this movie is undoubtedly the fifteen-minute nightmare sequence. A mixture of cabaret and S & M plays like a really unsettling What The Butler Saw movie. It starts off making sense, Glen marries Barbara whilst the devil watches them, but it soon devolves into a woman being whipped as she lays on a sofa, another woman rips her dress off, a woman gets bound and gagged on a sofa, a woman brushes her hair, a woman then gets molested by the devil, all watched over by Lugosi. Watching this scene you half expect to receive a phone call at the end of it telling you that you only have seven days left until a scary Japanese ghost crawls out of your TV to kill you.

As a movie this was a bold directorial debut by Wood as he tried to deliver an important message of acceptance with it, but ultimately his ineptitude as a director and writer, and his casting of such awful actors lets him down. But whilst it may be terrible, it’s still good fun to watch and some of the incomprehensible dialog will have you rolling in the aisles with laughter. This movie may not be the greatest thing you’ll ever watch, but it’s by no means anywhere near the worst. So why not crack a beer, put on your best angora sweater and watch it this weekend?