Glen Or Glenda (Glen or Glenda (DVD))

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Glen or Glenda (DVD)
Date:	12/09/08 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unique, original, mysterious and deeply heartfelt.

Disadvantages: No decent DVD exists as of yet. Oh, and all that "Worst Film Ever" stuff.

Call it what you will - a desire to be antagonistic, a post-irony Damascus-esque revelation, a love for the idiosyncratic - but I've come to see Ed Wood as something of a wonder in the world of cinema, rather than an embarrassment.

Routinely damned as the Worst Director Of All Time, Ed Wood, especially following Tim Burton's utterly glorious, magisterial biopic, has enjoyed something of a comeback (albeit a posthumous comeback - he died in 1978). His name is known well beyond the cult circles - everyone knows what an "Ed Wood film" means, or knows at least what we have decided it means.

Horrible dialogue, awful performances, disregard for continuity, "special" effects in the way that the cat with two legs and a blind eye is "special"...

Perhaps it's time to look again, though. To wipe the Smug off the face long enough to take these films on their own terms (and I have been as guilty of the Smug as anyone).

Glen Or Glenda is perhaps the quintessential Edward D. Wood Jnr film. More so than Plan 9 From Outer Space, even, Glen Or Glenda seems to have spilled undiluted from Wood's mind onto the screen, with no compromise, no concessions to any "audience demand" standing in the way of the man's vision.

The film tells of both Glen (played by Wood), a closet transvestite (although he does wander the streets in female apparel as "Glenda") and Alan, soon to become Anne following a sex-change operation. The secondary narrative does perhaps stand as SOMETHING of a concession to the studio's demands (Ed was hired to make an exploitation picture called I Changed My Sex, not the deeply personal I Wear Women's Clothing fever-dream that resulted), but the bulk of the running time concerns the heavily-autobiographical story of Glen, relating his trials and torments via an array of docu-drama episodes, dream-sequences and horror film-influenced cut-aways to a narrating mad scientist, played by Wood's friend Bela Lugosi.

The Ed Wood mainstays are all in evidence - the overuse of seemingly inappropriate stock footage (Lightening! Street scenes! War!), the astonishingly bad performances, the continuity errors, the overwrought dialogue, the cheap props, the disregard for conventional narrative logic, but one also finds Wood's beautifully childlike view of the world, his veneration of the ostracised, his belief in the inherent magic and mystery of cinema, his total blindness towards genre boundaries, his infectious love of fashioning a whole from a slew of the most disparate elements...

So yes, it IS in many ways an amateur-feeling affair, and it's reach far, far exceeds its grasp on numerous occasions, but approached with an open mind, one may well find oneself looking beyond the superficial "badness" of the enterprise and stumbling upon the truly unique charm Glen Or Glenda holds.

Summary: Approach it with an open mind and you may well find yourself enchanted.