GLEN OR GLENDA?
(a.k.a. He or She; I Led Two Lives; I Changed My Sex; The Transvestite)
Directed by Edward Wood, Jr.
1953

This movie is just plain weird. What starts off as a compassionate and clinical look at men who want to wear women’s clothing turns into footage of people whipping and tying each other up and, for fun, Satan popping in and out of scenes. For more giggles, cut in stock footage of bulls running and Bela Lugosi intoning “Pull the string! Pull the string!” in his thick Hungarian accent. If none of this makes sense, congratulations, you’ve just lost your Ed Wood virginity.

Most trash fans know the background of the Ed Wood/Bela Lugosi films: Wood was an eccentric unintentionally-trashtacular director with a fetish for wearing women’s sweaters on the set. He befriended Lugosi at the end of Lugosi’s career when Bela was dancing with a huge morphine monkey on his back. In other words, Lugosi would do just about any bit of nonsense Wood asked for because he was high off his ass. Here, he pulls a spooky Dracula act as some sort of omnipresent narrator. During the whipping scenes, the camera cuts to Lugosi staring into space for no reason. The film ends with Lugosi warning “SNIPS AND SNAILS AND PUPPY DOG TAILS!” Heed his warning!! Men suck because they are made of icky things!

Starring as Glen under the pseudonym “Daniel Davis,” Wood makes an awkward Glenda as he models ‘50s fashion while cutting inexplicably to scenes of a dour looking Lugosi in a horror film set. Lugosi stares into shadows a lot, mixes dry ice mad scientist potions and warns us “Bevare! Bevare of the Big Green Dragon that sits on your doorstep!” What this has to do about transvestites is all the fun of this Ed Wood film. Lightening flashes throughout, perhaps to symbolize Glen’s inner struggle as he angsts over whether to tell his fiancé about his proclivity to wearing a bad blonde wig and heels. In one foray into Glen’s troubled mind, a bunch of logs (a tree? A cross?) fall on his fiancé in the living room. Wood has trouble deciding whether Glen or Glenda? is a horror movie, a classroom education film, or a riveting drama about Satan, who has bushy eyebrows and looks like a woodland sprite.

A perfect Ed Wood film for beginners, it has everything that is a hallmark of an Ed Wood film: stock footage, bad production values, dialogue that borders on pontification, cheap sets and inexplicable effects. The film is only 67 minutes and even that seems padded with lots of footage of cars over Lugosi’s incantations and a conversation between two unseen ironworkers over footage of molten iron ore. Who needs sets, or even actors, in an Ed Wood film?

The film is a tad bitter toward women for THEY get the comfortable clothes, according to Wood. Right, high heels are comfortable loungewear. The movie swings between being misogynistic (women don’t know how good they have it because they get to wear soft sweaters) and pro-women (the happiest men are the men who get to dress like their girlfriends). The film contains one of Ed Wood’s most classic scenes ever with Glen’s fiancé taking the sweater off her own body and handing it to him as a symbol of her love and acceptance of his transvestite behavior. This scene is worth sitting through the film alone.

Glen or Glenda? is a 10 on the trash film scale. It’s a classic. It’s incoherent, funny, bizarre, and really, you can’t go wrong with a doped up Lugosi, Satan, running bulls, bondage, and transvestites all in 67 minutes.

-Zzilly Gutbuckets (aka Lizz Fisher)