Glen Or Glenda (1953)

After 30 years of working in Hollywood as actor, screenwriter, director, producer and pulp novelist without artistic or financial success, Edward D. Wood, Jr., recently evicted and staying with his wife at a friend's North Hollywood apartment, his health broken by years of alcohol abuse, his films largely forgotten, died in 1978 at the age of 54. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, called his Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the "worst movie ever made," and sparked a revival of interest itheradiatorn Wood's colorful and trsequencemic life and bizarre career in cinema; today he is probably one of the best known, and also most well-loved, makers of cult film. He has been the subject of essays, books, documentaries and even a Hollywood bio-pic directed by Tim Burton in 1994, Ed Wood.

While the Medved brothers' largely patronizing and derisive treatment of Wood definitely set the tone for much of Wood's posthumous reputation, the books and films mentioned above have done much to rehabilitate his status from a laughing-stock to cinema's quintessential outsider artist, someone whose devotion to movies was heartfelt and passionate enough to surmount lack of funding and contacts, public indifference and even his own lack of aesthetic discernment, craft, and sophistication: Wikipedia's article on Wood lists thirteen feature films directed by him, three television films, and seventeen produced scripts written by him. His drive and zeal, his love of his chosen medium, and his pride in his own work would do any artist credit, and his films have the power to delight, enchant and even inspire. They are uncynical, bewilderingly different from just about anything else, and above all personal, bearing witness to his own enthusiastic, ebullient and eccentric personality.

Glen Or Glenda was originally to be a film called I Changed My Sex, capitalizing on the notoriety of George Jorgenson, who became Christine Jorgenson after the world's first gender-reassignment surgery. When Wood agreed to producer George Weiss's offer to write and direct the project, Wood rapidly turned the bulk of the film into a docudrama about cross-dressing. For one of the major aspects of the Ed Wood legend was his cross-dressing: he was particularly drawn to angora sweaters -- the latter are so much associated with Wood that one of the above-mentioned documentaries was called Look Back In Angora.

The film opens in a rented room where Patrick, a man who has been arrested four times for wearing women's clothes in public, lies dead in his favorite outfit, a suicide who would rather die a happy woman than live as a miserable man. Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot), the detective in charge of the case, is puzzled by the young man's motivation for suicide and consults psychiatrist Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell), who tells him of one of his patients: Glen (played by Wood himself under the name "Daniel Davis"), a man with a compulsion to wear women's clothes. Glen agonizes over whether to tell his fiancée Barbara (Wood's then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller) about his "other self," Glenda, whom Glen becomes when in women's clothes. Dr. Alton also tells Inspector Warren of another case: Alan-Ann ("Tommy" Haynes), who decided to actually go ahead and have his gender reassigned, and who, after hormone therapy and many grueling surgeries, faces the world as a happy and attractive young woman. The detective and the doctor return to Glen's case and discuss how Glen and Barbara worked out the problem of "the other woman" with the help of true love and the understanding of modern medicine.

In essence, Glen Or Glenda is a film about "gender identity" decades before the term would be coined and defined through reams of abstruse academic and polemical prose. Dr. Alton takes pains to define what transvestitism is and is not: it is not homosexuality (and indeed it isn't: cross-dressers are overwhelmingly straight males who are very secure in their sexual orientation and masculinity), neither is it transexualism. Here it is difficult to tell how "accurate" Wood is in his assessment of men who want to be women: Alton refers to Alan-Ann as a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" who carries physical characteristics common to both genders. What is clear is Wood's open, tolerant, and non-judgmental attitude towards all the groups discussed: if one is only allowed to be what one feels one is, then one is happy. As a denizen of the Hollywood fringes, Wood knew all sorts of eccentrics and people whose lifestyles did not fit the molds of a repressive time. At a time when gender, class, and race were strictly defined and as immutable as the law of gravity, Wood's message was subversive and forward-thinking, and one that is more comprehensible and relevant today than he probably ever imagined.

Ahead of its time though it may be, and historically significant for its message, Glen Or Glenda is still an Ed Wood film, and the message of tolerance comes in Wood's own inimitable way. While Dr. Alton discusses the stories of these two patients, the comfort of women's clothes as opposed to men's, and the differences between transvestites, homosexuals and transsexuals, actor Bela Lugosi, whom Wood befriended and revered as a sort of touchstone of the old Hollywood films which inspired his own career, appears at intervals in a dark study-laboratory set and offers cryptic comments, strange metaphors, mysterious platitudes about modern life, and nursery rhymes. At one point he fiddles around with laboratory glassware, mixing vaporous potions with his test tubes and flasks; at others, characters such as Glen, Barbara and Alan-Ann enter and kneel before his chair and disappear with a wave of his hand. Often he utters his cryptic pronouncements while looking at crowded streets in split-screen, or superimposed over shots of stampeding bison. Billed as "Scientist" in the credits, Lugosi's role in the picture resembles nothing so much as a distant, god-like figure, observing his creation and offering his comments to the viewer, but never deigning to intervene or even to judge.

Meanwhile Dr. Alton compares present-day objections to transvestitism and transexualism with the objections that were supposedly once raised against automobiles and airplanes. Men and women say "If the Creator had intended us to be born [boys/girls] we would certainly have been born [boys/girls]," accompanied by extreme close ups of faces and ears. A close up of the radiator in Patrick's room accompanies the reading of Patrick-Patricia's suicide note, for no discernible reason (it has been reported that this random cutaway inspired the "woman in the radiator" sequence in David Lynch's Eraserhead). But the centerpiece of the film has to be the nightmare sequence, where Glen's fears of social ostracism and losing Barbara are played out. "Normal" men and women point and laugh, Glen alternately appears as himself and as Glenda, in a jumbled, half-struck version of the set that served as Barbara's apartment, where Glenda cannot lift a log that pins Barbara but Glen can. Glen and Barbara are married by a minister with the Devil (played by a man credited on IMDB as "Captain DeZita" and who also appears in the film as Glen's father) as witness. Suddenly a number of shots of scantily-clad women, dancing, posing or even in light bondage appear to blaring jazz music, with the faces of Glen, Glenda and Lugosi's character intercut at intervals (this last being added by producer Weiss after Wood completed the film). Glen awakens from his nightmare determined to come clean with Barbara, and after explaining everything to her, Barbara reels in shock... but slowly decides to accept him as he is, and in a moment that is as touching as it is ridiculous, removes her angora sweater and gives it to Glen.

God knows what George Weiss, whose name can be found associated with films from the forties to the sixties, from burlesque to poverty row noir to sexploitation, thought of what he received from Wood, but it was released because it had already been presold to theaters. However, from this point on, Wood became his own producer, going on to make films like Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1961) before he became unable to find financing. As the sixties wore on, he did more screenwriting, production assistance, and occasional acting on titles like The Violent Years (1956), Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), Shotgun Wedding (1963), and Orgy of the Dead (1965), this last a nudie-cutie with a horror theme directed by Stephen Apostolof that breathes pure Ed Wood in its cheapness, overblown dialogue and an appearance by television psychic and Plan 9 player Criswell. His only other appearance as a lead is in one softcore sexploitation film, The Love Feast (1969), which is also worth checking out. He also made at least one hardcore porn movie, again with a horror theme, Necromania (1971). Screenwriting and pulp writing occupied his last years.

(My own library contains three titles published by Four Walls Eight Windows in the late nineties: Killer In Drag and Death of a Transvestite, and his memoir, Hollywood Rat Race. Feral House had reprinted a number of his other titles, but have suspended publication and sales of their Wood titles as of late last year. The Ed Wood article at Wikipedia, linked above, explains why.)

Dolores Fuller (b. 1923) appeared in two other Wood films: Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster, after which their relationship ended. According to the IMDB, She went on into the music business, writing songs for Elvis Presley, and started a record label, Dee Dee Records, where she was instrumental in the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker. She also has frequently appeared at showbiz conventions, often with the angora sweater she wore in her Wood films. Since 2003 she has been living in Las Vegas.

Lyle Talbot (1902-1996), an actor of some ability, performed in A and B pictures, often as a heavy. He also appeared in Plan 9 as a general. A busy, prolific actor, his career in films and television lasted from the early 30s to the 50s. Timothy Farrell (1922-1989), who also appeared in Jail Bait, was an actor of less ability, with a stone face matching his monotonal delivery, but memorable to exploitation fans in such films as Girl Gang (1954) and Dance Hall Racket (1955), a film directed by Phil Tucker (Robot Monster) and written by Lenny Bruce, who also plays Farrell's violence prone henchman.

I viewed Glen Or Glenda on a 2000 Image Entertainment DVD, which contains the original theatrical release version and a trailer. Another version, which I viewed some years ago on VHS, contains a longer cut including some footage of Glen being approached by a homosexual man.

Postscript: 5-14-11: The Los Angeles Times reported that Dolores Fuller passed away at her home in Las Vegas on May 9 at the age of 88. She is survived by husband, film historian Philip Chamberlin, a son, three grandchildren, and a number of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren, to all of whom we send our condolences and best wishes.