Review of Glen or Glenda (1953) by Richard D — 06 May 2018

Ed Wood was supposed to make a film about Christine Jorgensen, and largely hijacked the film to focus on his own transvestism. He inserts his new friend Bela Lugosi as a sort of God figure controlling the destinies of people.

This is not a conventionally good film. The dialogue is strange, convoluted and tortured. Although Lugosi is good ... I guess ... he seems totally convincing as whatever the hell he's playing, and Wood himself is a passable actor, most of the actors are just terrible.

But ironically, this is not a terrible film, and it's largely because Wood basically threw out the original concept and went with his highly personal vision of what this film should be. It's a touchingly sincere plea for tolerance with a strange, accidentally avant-garde structure.

It's a strange bit of outsider art that was supposed to be just another tedious bit of cheap exploitation. It doesn't really sustain it's momentum. It runs for barely over an hour and it's still quite a bit too long.

But when it is humming on all cylinders, which it really is for about 40 minutes, it's really kind of delightful.