Glen or Glenda (1953)
Framed by Bela Lugosi as a cryptic figure musing on the follies of mankind, the film follows Glen, a man terrified to tell his fiancee that he secretly wears women's clothes, alongside a second thread about a person seeking sex-reassignment surgery. Dream sequences and stock footage crowd in around the pleas for tolerance.
Ed Wood wrote, directed, and starred (as Glen, under a pseudonym) in this exploitation quickie rushed out to cash in on the Christine Jorgensen headlines, drawing on his own cross-dressing. Long derided as one of the worst films ever made, Glen or Glenda has been reclaimed as a strange, sincere plea for acceptance; it has been treated as public domain for decades, though a specific renewal record has not been located.
Background
Ed Wood wrote, directed, and starred in Glen or Glenda under the pseudonym Daniel Davis, using the film to address his own experience wearing women’s clothing. It was produced quickly to take advantage of public attention on Christine Jorgensen, one of the first Americans to become widely known for gender-affirming surgery, though the film’s second plot thread about surgery is only loosely connected to the main story about Glen’s fear of telling his fiancée about cross-dressing. Bela Lugosi appears in a framing role delivering strange, unrelated monologues.
What to watch for
The film is often ranked among the worst ever made, but it has been reassessed by some critics and scholars as an unusually personal and sincere plea for tolerance, however clumsily made. Watch for the tonal whiplash between Wood’s earnest message, Lugosi’s bizarre interjections, and stock footage dropped in to pad the runtime. It rewards viewing less as conventional entertainment and more as a curious artifact of a filmmaker working through his own life story in public, decades before that kind of openness was common.
