Movie 2: Glen or Glenda (1953)
Directed by Ed Wood
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL
Plot:
A transvestite struggles with the question of whether -- or, more accurately, how -- to tell his fiance his secret. Hilarity ensues.
Reaction:
Perhaps I would have been better prepared for this if I had had more experience with Ed Wood films. But, alas, the only two of his movies that I'd seen were Plan 9 from Outer Space (which I slept through) and The Young Marrieds (which did, I'll admit, keep me up). So I'd heard that the man;s movies were a bit...off. But I hadn't really taken it to heart.
The fact is, this is a mess of a film. As Keith explained it to us, producer George Weiss wanted to make an exploitation film to take advantage of Christine Jorgensen's then-recent sex-reassignment surgery. But his director, Ed Wood, delivered a sort of semi-autobiographical documentary about life as a transvestite. Weiss insisted that he add more, so Wood quickly added in a story of a transexual who goes through with the surgery and lives happily ever after -- told largely with stock footage. As a result, the there's a disjointed quality that's jarring. The most noticable instance occurs when Glen finally tells his fiance about his trasvestitism. She thinks a bit about it, then stands up and hands him her angora sweater. That would have been the perfect ending, and indeed it was Wood's original ending. But as released, the film continues onward with other story lines.
But that's not the worst of it. The ever-present narrator describes most of what occurs in that sort of chirpy style that we've all seen in PSA's. And despite the existence of a narrator, there's Bela Lugosi (credited as "Scientist") who appears from time to time giving pointless commentary or waxing philosophical. There's really no need for him to be there, other than the fact that Ed Wood liked him. A couple of guys in the class are big fans of Lugosi, and liked seeing him. But...what was he thinking (other than, "hey! an easy thousand bucks for me!")? OK, I did find some of his stuff amusing.
In other parts, there were long segments of stock footage. Onscreen we see clips (sometimes the same ones, over and over again) of highway traffic or of machines in some kind of metal-working plant. It kind of makes it seem that these heavy machines are talking to each other.
A couple of us really had no idea how to rate this movie, given how far it deviated from standard narrative movies.
Ratings:
Me: A drunken night playing cards in Vinnie's basement
Dave: 7.5 to 8 as a movie, 9 as entertainment, 9.8 for strangeness
Ethan: 4
Joe: 1978, 1:15 in the morning, with Sheri
Sean: 1 out of 4
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