Daily Archives: October 8, 2015

Glen or Glenda
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
Written by Edward D. Wood Jr.
1953/USA
Screen Classics
First viewing/You Tube

[box] Scientist: Beware. Beware. Beware of the big, green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys, puppy dog tails and big, fat snails. Beware. Take care. Beware.[/box]

This movie may be one of the strangest ever made.  Also one of the worst.

For some reason, probably because he could get Lugosi cheap, Ed Wood’s story of the agonies of a cross-dresser is framed like a horror movie.  Lugosi sits in a chair in a skeleton-filled laboratory and spouts ponderous non-sequitors, breaking in throughout the film.  Whenever he is around thunder and lightening follow.

Then we get to the second framing devise.  A transvestite has committed suicide and the policeman assigned to the case interviews a psychiatrist about how to avert further such tragedies.  He informs the cop that treatment depends on the “type” of the sufferer. Hermaphrodites and psuedo-hermaphrodites can be helped with sex change surgery.  Then he turns to the case of Glen/Glenda.

[box] [voice-over during stock footage of cars on a freeway] Narrator: The world is a strange place to live in. All those cars. All going someplace. All carrying humans, which are carrying out their lives.[/box]

Glen (played by Wood under an alias) is engaged to Barbara.  He spends most of his leisure time when she is not around dressed in the silks and angora he craves and wrestles with how to break the news.  His dilemma causes him to have a nightmare that I can’t begin to describe adequately.  Suffice it say it involves a devil, a number of sinister beckoning women, and some girl-on-girl light sado-masochistic action.

Throughout the film I just had to puzzle over a mind so foreign that it could put something like this together.  The dialogue is absolutely surreal.  The film is not just “different” though. It is also incredibly lazy and irritating.  Wood is constantly killing time and saving money by inserting stock footage that has only the most tangential relationship to the action.  At only 70 minutes, I was checking my watch during each one of these interludes.

Glen or Glenda is one of the movies focused on in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood and may be interesting to fans of that film.  You will never see anything quite like it.  Multiple versions are available on YouTube.

Trailer

I vitelloni
Directed by Federico Fellini
Written by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli
1953/Italy/France
Cité Films/Peg-Films
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Sergio Natali: He who cares not for art, cares not for life.[/box]

This early Fellini film about a group of slackers in small town Italy seems to presage the reminisces of Amarcord.

The story is an episodic look at incidents from the daily life of a group of life-long buddies.  Most of them are around thirty, live with their parents, and avoid work or responsibility as much as possible.  We see the action through the eyes of Moraldo who is some years younger yet more mature than the others.

The thread that holds the plot together is the exploits of Fausto, a ladies’ man.  He gets Moraldo’s sister Sandra pregnant and is eventually forced to marry her.  This does not curb his wandering eye in the least.  The couple lives with her parents and he finally gets a job with his father-in-law’s friend.  One of his first moves is to try to seduce his boss’s wife.

We also follow the efforts of an aspiring playwright (Leopoldo Trieste) in the group and the story of hard partier Alberto (Alberto Sordi), whose sister’s affair with a married man is a severe trial to himself and his mother.

Fellini is becoming Fellini in this movie.  If you share his sense of humor (or mine), this is a funny and enjoyable watch.  It is also quite interesting visually.  Only downside was I kept wishing something terrible would happen to Fausto and was disappointed.

I Vitelloni was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen.

Trailer