Henry accidentally kills his boss’ cat during a graveyard shift at work. Things start to make less sense from there (in a good way.)
And yes, that is Jason Kulas from After Last Season in the lead.
Tag Archives: Black and White
170. GLEN OR GLENDA (1953)
“Some argue that this kind of thing puts Ed Wood into the company of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
Should we buy this argument? Pull the string!”–IMDB Glen or Glenda FAQ
DIRECTED BY: Ed Wood, Jr.
FEATURING: Bela Lugosi, Ed Wood, Jr. (as Daniel Davis), Dolores Fuller, Timothy Farrell, Lyle Talbot
PLOT: A transvestite is found dead, a suicide. Seeking to understand more about this phenomenon, a police inspector visits a psychiatrist who explains transvestism to him using the example of Glen, a heterosexual man who is tormented by the question of whether he should reveal his passion for cross-dressing to his fiancée. Meanwhile, a sinister, omniscient “scientist” (played by Bela Lugosi) occasionally appears to cryptically comment on the action (“pull the string!”)
BACKGROUND:
- Producer George Weiss wanted to make a film to exploit the then-current case of Christine Jorgensen (born George William Jorgensen), one of the first men to have successful sex-reassignment surgery. According to legend, Ed Wood convinced Weiss that he was the right man to direct the picture because he was a transvestite in his private life and understood gender confusion. The resulting film, shot in just four days, ended up being more about transvestism than sex-change surgery.
- Against Wood’s wishes, Weiss inserted bondage-themed imagery into the dream sequence to give the film a dash more sex.
- Wood himself plays the transvestite Glen (and Glenda) under the pseudonym Daniel Davis.
- In his own life, Wood did not take the advice he gave his character in Glen or Glenda to honestly discuss his desire to wear women’s clothes with his betrothed. Wood’s first wife had their marriage annulled in 1955, after Ed surprised her by wearing ladies’ undergarments to their honeymoon.
- This is the first of three collaborations between Wood and then down-on-his-luck and opiate-addicted Bela Lugosi. Three of Lugosi’s final four credits were Wood films.
- Some reviews of Glen or Glenda refer to Lugosi’s character as “the Spirit” rather than “the Scientist”; were there two separate sets of credits, each with a different name for the character?
- Wood’s 1963 novel “Killer in Drag” features a transvestite character named Glen whose alter-ego is named Glenda.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Such a wealth of possibilities! What about the hairy Satan who inexplicably shows up at Glen and Barbara’s dream wedding? And who can forget Bela Lugosi, yelling nonsense at the viewer while his angry face is superimposed over a herd of stampeding buffalo? The iconic image, however, is Wood’s intended emotional climax: in a ridiculously touching gesture of unconditional acceptance, Glen’s girlfriend Barbara strips off her angora sweater and hands it to the wide-eyed transvestite.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A narratively-knotted 1950s pro-transvestite pseudo-documentary, told in naively earnest rhetoric via a wandering structure that includes flashbacks inside of flashbacks, would have made for a worthwhile oddity in itself. But throw in Bela Lugosi as a one-man Greek chorus reciting fractured fairy tales, and include a fourteen-minute dream sequence mixing Freudian symbolism, bargain-basement Expressionism, bondage, and a guest appearance by the Devil and you achieve incomparable weirdness, the way only Ed Wood could serve it up—on a bed of angora.
Clip from Glen or Glenda
COMMENTS: Ed Wood had a secret, and it’s not just that he liked the feel of silk panties under his rough trousers. Transvestism, in a way, was the Continue reading 170. GLEN OR GLENDA (1953)
366 UNDERGROUND: WAY DOWN IN CHINATOWN (2013)
DIRECTED BY: Eric Michael Kochmer
FEATURING: Justin Dray, Stephanie Sanditz, Lisa Loring, Nancy Wolfe, Ashli Haynes
PLOT: Playwright Victor Mitchum (Dray) and his director/wife Jessica Mitchum (Sanditz) receive funding to produce their new play, “Apocalypse Tomorrow.” As they start auditions for the play, the real Apocalypse begins, involving worms taking human form and the song ‘Goodnight, Irene’.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It takes more than avant-garde pretensions to make a good weird film. This is strictly a ‘love it or hate it’ movie, and I completely hated it within the first 10 minutes.
COMMENTS: One of the worst P.O.S. that I’ve had occasion to watch; yet another project to give the term ‘avant-garde’ a bad reputation. Essentially a play adapted for film, it takes all the worst aspects of experimental cinema/theater and throws it in your lap. If you’re a fan of German Expressionism, you’re better off finding the real thing to watch instead of half-baked ‘tributes’ like this that cheapen and taint the term.
One could watch the film ironically, and see it as a parody of self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual tripe that tries to pass itself off as deep and meaningful; but the film is so serious that even watching it ironically is exhausting and unsatisfying. Not even the presence of Lisa Loring (Wednesday Addams from “The Addams Family” television show) elevates this to camp value.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
LIST CANDIDATE: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1967)
DIRECTED BY: Alain Robbe-Grillet
FEATURING: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marie-France Pisier, Alain Robbe-Grillet
PLOT: A director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) pitches a complicated story about a cocaine smuggling caper to a producer during a train ride, and the audience watches the results play out, revisions and all.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The second film from novelist-turned-director Alain Robbe-Grillet is a pioneering work of cinematic meta-fiction that prefigures the work of Charlie Kaufman (among others) by putting a fictional author inside of the movie, one who supposedly writes the script in real time as we watch. Sometimes the story backtracks on itself, erasing old plot points or creating alternative scenarios. To make things even stranger, the protagonist of the movie-inside-the-movie is obsessed with bondage, and begins a relationship with an elegant prostitute who may help him fulfill his most excessive fantasies.
COMMENTS: Sitting on the Trans-Europ-Express from Paris to Antwerp, a director tells his producer that they should set a movie on this train; they decide it should be about drug smuggling. A man, who we’ve previously seen buying a suitcase to smuggle cocaine, walks into their compartment. The producer and director are invisible to him; he only sees the script girl. When he leaves almost immediately, the director comments “is he crazy?” “Didn’t you recognize him?,” asks the producer. “It’s Trintignant. What about using him in your film?” They then do proceed to use Trintigant in their film treatment. The story they concoct on the fly sends him to an Antwerp where everyone is either an operative working for the local cartel or a detective, and where he is sent on an increasingly Byzantine series of rendezvous to prove his worth and to obscure his tracks. Along the way he begins a relationship with the prostitute Eva, with whom he indulges his strangling fetish. After a series of double crosses and betrayals which are nearly impossible to sort out, because the director keeps rewriting the script, it all ends in tragedy at “Eve’s Witchcraft Cabaret,” a bondage-themed club with a naked girl chained to a rotating stage.
Despite the dark themes, Trans-Europ-Express is actually a comedy, though in a high-minded, very French way—more “witty” than “funny.” The movie’s abstract, Cubist twists on gangster scenarios recall Seijun Suzuki‘s crazy yakuza film Branded to Kill, also from 1967. Although it deconstructs the conventions of a genre picture in similar fashion to Jean-Luc Godard‘s 1960 Breathless, the light touch and playfulness keeps Express from feeling as ponderous and self-important as the works of some of Robbe-Grillet’s New Wave contemporaries. At the same time, the movie’s perverse sexuality, related to the subconscious desires of Surrealism, ventures further into the forbidden than his contemporaries dared. Express‘ scenes of sexual strangulation, implied rape and even nudity were considered pretty hot stuff at the time, although they will look tame through jaded modern eyes.
Robbe-Grillet began his career as an experimental novelist, helping to found the avant-garde “nouvelle roman” genre. He turned to cinema after co-writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais. Trans-Europ-Express was his second film as director. The Kino sub-label Redemption began releasing Robbe-Grillet’s neglected films, some of which have never been on DVD before, in 2014.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
366 UNDERGROUND: A PUBLIC RANSOM (2014)
DIRECTED BY: Pablo D’Stair
FEATURING: Carlyle Edwards, Helen Bonaparte, Goodloe Byron
PLOT: Steven (Carlyle Edwards) is a self-serving, amoral author of very mediocre talent. When he stumbles across a crayon-scribbled “missing child” poster with a telephone number and the words “HLEPP ME?” scrawled on it, he figures it to be harmless. Deciding to base a story around it, he calls the number. This leads to an encounter with Bryant (Goodloe Byron) who claims to have actually kidnapped a girl, stating she will be released only if Steven pays a $2,000 ransom within two weeks. Steven initially dismisses Bryant as a morbid prankster—until Bryant begins a relationship with his only friend, Rene (Helen Bonaparte) and starts popping up in his life in apparently coincidental, yet increasingly invasive and unsettling ways.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: To give it its due, this isn’t a wholly terrible film, though it is lacking in certain important factors. That said, the compelling aspects do not come from anything markedly weird, and as such it has no place on the List of weird movies.
COMMENTS: The central premise of A Public Ransom is fascinating: the wrong person finds a cry for help, someone who doesn’t have an altruistic bone in his body. The events that follow can’t be faulted. Indeed, the writing overall is excellent, and it’s not D’Stair’s failing with a pen which make this difficult to view. He casts an impressive shadow with his scripting, and the small cast largely live up to the characters D’Stair has written and fleshed out so well. Lead actor Carlyle Edwards is teeth-grittingly unpleasant as the utter and complete prick Steven. His performance seems a little too mannered at first, but his overwrought, overbearing and obnoxious personality truly matches that of someone who has no awareness of their own obvious shortcomings. Awful people really are like this. Helen Bonaparte tries her best as Stevens’ foil, but her performance is stilted and flat by comparison. It’s difficult to believe in the friendship between them when it lacks such chemistry, especially in some of the more pivotal later scenes. Goodloe Byron’s turn as Bryant is purposefully bland, which really makes his character work for the better. He is very mild mannered and unobtrusive, which makes him all the more disturbing given the possible nature of his actions.
All this is well and good, but a smart script and a functional cast can’t save a film if the director and photographer’s auteur vision is so painfully marred by an inability to hold a camera. Paul VanBrocklin is director D’Stair’s head of photography, and between the two of them they seem barely able to frame a shot in any workable way. The film itself looks ugly, and is a major turn off. It’s true that an amateur film maker might not have access to a high quality camera or a steadicam or the like to make tracking shots work. But ugly, dull and unimaginatively presented still scenes permeate the film to such a point that, while you can see the intent behind the director’s approach (his desire to imitate his influences such as Jim Jarmusch), the whole thing ends up being a poorly shot and poorly lit mess that drags the viewer away from the strength of the writing. It’s a film with a lot of heart and D’stair should be proud of it for what it is, as it’s head and shoulders above a lot of amateur independent film, making but if he was to turn out another feature it would need to show marked technical improvement to earn a general recommendation.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
More information on A Public Ransom, including a link and a password to view the movie for yourself (at the time of publication), can be found at the official A Public Ransom site.