ioFilm.co.uk – Thessaly
It’s tempting to reach for extremes when talking about Ed Wood. To say his films are the worst ever made, or conversely to argue that they’re lost classics, cult gems ahead of their time. They’re neither – or both – but the one thing they’re not is boring. Well, to be honest, sometimes they are quite boring, but in the sort of way where you don’t mind being bored, because it’s all so strange that even the tedious stuff is quite interesting (though maybe you wouldn’t watch them over and over).
Glen Or Glenda was his most personal work, probably the definitive transvestite/transsexual movie even today. Yes, there have been better written, less kinky, more realistic treatments of the themes, but none as achingly sincere. Glen just wants to wear his girlfriend’s fluffy jumper, because it’s nice – a superbly simplistic view of cross-dressing. But the moment when Barbara (Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, a stunningly wooden actress) takes it off and hands it to him with Great Significance is actually genuinely moving, for all its nonsense.
And so, on some level, is Bela Lugosi’s performance, the once-great charismatic screen star, now drug-addled and babbling about “puppy dog tails” and “pull the strings” over stock footage of charging buffalo and the like. Maybe he’s the devil, maybe God, maybe just a way to stretch the film to feature length and utilise one of Wood’s few assets, a star name, but while his narration makes no actual sense, it is certainly memorable and watchable.