GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)



By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!”  Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

Read More...