Glen or Glenda (1953)
Movie rating: 3/10
Ripping on a film by Edward D. Wood, Jr. feels a bit like playing basketball against a little kid: the person you’re up against is at a distinct disadvantage. Wood, of course, has gone down in history as the Worst Director of all Time, a title bestowed upon him in 1980 in the form of a posthumous Golden Turkey Award. Tim Burton would go on to immortalize him in the affectionate 1994 biopic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp in the title role.
Having owned a copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space on DVD, I had some experience with Wood’s work prior to watching Glen or Glenda. While The Room in recent years has edged out Plan 9 for me as the most entertaining “worst movie of all time”, Wood’s science fiction opus still ranks among the upper echelon of jaw-droppingly awful cinema. Glen or Glenda, too, has been derided by the likes of Leonard Maltin as one of the worst movies ever made. Unlike Plan 9, whose schlock Z-movie plot involved aliens seeking to conquer Earth by reanimating the dead, Glen or Glenda has some more interesting things to say from a sociological perspective.
The movie presents itself as a docudrama focusing primarily on two individuals. The first story, which occupies most of the running time, is that of Glen/Glenda (Wood, credited as “Daniel Davis”), a cross-dresser who likes to wear women’s clothing but fears the reaction of his fiancée Barbara (Dolores Fuller, Wood’s girlfriend at the time, and a songwriter who later wrote numerous songs performed by Elvis Presley). The second is Alan/Anne (“Tommy” Haynes), a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” who undergoes a sex change operation.
Wood mainstay Bela Lugosi portrays the “Scientist”, a kind of narrator except for the fact that what he says has little obvious relation to the story. The narrator of what we actually see on screen is Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell), who relates the story of Glen/Glenda and Alan/Anne to Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot) following the suicide of a cross-dresser named Patrick/Patricia. Lugosi’s character is bizarre and, as one might expect given his notorious typecasting, seems more like Dracula than an actual scientist. Oh, I suppose a scientist’s office may be dominated by skulls and skeletons on display, but with Lugosi in front the scenes can’t help but feel like we’re looking at a Halloween display. Constant lightning strikes only add to the inexplicable horror vibe, which doesn’t really gel with much of the film. The result is tonal whiplash.
Lugosi’s character makes little sense, but the actor can’t help but be wildly entertaining. He channels his horror-movie screen presence into making the most of his ludicrous dialogue. One speech in particular is legendary: “Beware,” Lugosi warns the audience. “Beware of the big, green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys, puppy dog tails and big, fat snails. Beware. Take care. Beware.” Of course with his thick Hungarian accent, it sounds more like “Bevare!” It’s terrific, and/or terrifically bad; you be the judge.
Glen or Glenda has all the hallmarks of Wood’s output: wooden acting, bad editing, non sequitur dialogue, cheap production values, and copious stock footage. A single newspaper prop is used numerous times. There are noticeable edits in the middle of scenes: words missing, oddly abrupt endings. Significant sections feel totally out of place, in particular what Wikipedia describes as “a series of erotic vignettes containing BDSM, striptease, lesbian, autoerotic, and rape fantasy themes” involving random actors we haven’t seen. Wood himself didn’t create any of these vignettes; rather, producer George Weiss apparently added them because he felt the movie wasn’t long enough (reminding me of another legendary bad movie, Caligula, in which producer Bob Guccione filmed and inserted hardcore sex scenes against the wishes of director Tinto Brass). Silent reaction shots of Lugosi punctuate the vignettes, which just makes them more baffling.
The middle section has plenty of such surreal moments, but an extended dream sequence is more successful and relevant to the film’s themes. As director, Wood actually does an effective job conveying the insecurities of someone suffering from gender dysphoria in the stultifying conformity of the 1950s United States. There’s a scene in which Barbara is trapped under a fallen tree and Glenda is unable to lift the tree, but Glen is and rescues her. There’s a wedding dream sequence where Satan (William M.A. deOrgler) serves as Glen’s best man—an image that real life makes less funny than it may seem given the vicious transphobia of Christian right organizations like Focus on the Family, which has described the LGBTQ rights movement as a “particularly evil lie of Satan.”
There are scenes in which a panicked Glen imagines people—whom he may or may not know—laughing at him. For all their inadequacies and goofiness due to budgetary constraints and Wood’s lack of technical skills, these are memorable images that convey the despair of someone who feels alone, tortured, mocked, and misunderstood.
That stance is what makes Glen or Glenda so interesting and has helped it age well over time: its sympathetic depiction of transgender issues, an attitude virtually unheard of when it was made. I can’t think of an earlier film that called for tolerance of transgender people and related their experience with such understanding. Scenes of Glenda staring longingly into store windows and comparing herself to the female mannequins wearing women’s clothing pack an emotional punch—not something I thought I’d ever say about an Ed Wood film.
All this shines through all the film’s technical limitations and Wood’s endearingly sloppy filmmaking. It was brave to make a film like this in 1953. Sadly, it would be brave to make a film like this now. In the wake of the recent mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, and LGBTQ rights increasingly under attack, Glen or Glenda feels even more relevant today than when it was produced.
There’s a scene in which stock footage of airplanes and cars play while we hear people discuss whether it is “natural” for human beings to fly or speed around in large metal boxes. The point is not subtle, but to this day, social conservatives still describe being gay or transgender as “unnatural”. Glen or Glenda skewers the ridiculousness of this argument:
Narrator: One might say, there but for the grace of God go I. Why is a modern world shocked by this headline [“World Shocked by Sex Change”]? Why? Once, not so very long ago, people were saying:
Woman: Airplanes...ha! Why it's against the Creator's will. If the Creator wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings.
Narrator: But we fly. Maybe some of you remember an even sillier remark:
Man: Automobiles? Ah...they scare the horses. If'n the Creator hadda meant for us to roll around the countryside, we'd have been born with wheels.
Narrator: Silly? Certainly. We were not born with wings, we were not born with wheels. But in the modern world of today it's an accepted fact that we must have them. So we have corrected that which nature has not given us. Strangely enough, nature has given us all these things, we just had to learn how to put nature's elements together for our use, that's all. Yet the world is shocked by a sex change.
Woman: If the Creator had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings.
Man: If the Creator hadda meant us to roll around the countryside, we'd have been born with wheels.
Young Woman: If the Creator had meant us to be boys, we certainly would have been born boys.
Young Man: If the Creator had meant us to be girls, we certainly would have been born girls.
Narrator: Are we sure? Nature makes mistakes, it's proven everyday. This person is a transvestite. A man who is more comfortable wearing women's clothing. The term transvestite is the name given by medical science to those persons who wear the clothing of the opposite sex. The title of this can only be labelled Behind Locked Doors. Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even the lounging outfit he has on, and he's the happiest individual in the world. He can work better, think better, he can play better, and he can be more of a credit to his community and his government because he is happy. These things are his comfort. But why the wig and makeup? He dares to enter the street dressed in the clothes he so much desires to wear. But only if he really appears female. The long hair, the makeup, the clothing, the actual contours of a girl. Most transvestites do not want to change their life, their bodies, many of them simply want to change the clothing they wear to that as worn by the opposite sex.
The technically bad aspects of any Ed Wood film mean I have to give this one a lower rating in terms of pure moviemaking quality. But Glen or Glenda deserves praise for its sensitive depiction of transgender people. That was a courageous and pioneering stance for a movie to take in 1953, and sadly remains so today, which shows how far we still have to go in the struggle for transgender rights.