THE WORST WE CAN FIND - Christmas Advent Calendar: Day 4 - GLEN OR GLENDA

Day 4 of the The Worst We Can Find Christmas Advent Calendar see the first streaming example of The Mads are Back!  It’s not holiday-oriented. Heck, it’s not even festive. But there’s a guy dressed as Satan, and Satan is mentioned in the same book as God and Jesus, and Jesus fits into the season, so that’s one-degree of separation and we’ll go with that.

Glen or Glenda (April 13, 1954)

Program: The Mads Are Back

Air-Date: July 21, 2020

Original newspaper ad from November 1954 (Lubbock, Texas) and The Mads' initial artwork. 

Plot: Bela Lugosi narrates the opening and pops up briefly near the end; alternating between sitting in a chair and fooling around in a makeshift lab. The objective is to be operatic or possibly poetic, with Bela describing the designated roles of man, but it comes off as ideas rattling around inside Ed Wood’s head and spilling on to a script page. If you’ve seen a few of his movies, you know he was good at that. 

Bela steps out for a smoke and misses out on the story being told, which next moves to the suicide of a man dressed in woman’s clothing. The incident leads a police investigator (Lyle Talbot from Mesa of Lost Women and Plan 9) to a doctor (Timothy Farrell of Pin Down Girls and The Violent Years fame) to try to understand. The doctor narrates most of the remaining film, starting first with a discussion of crossdressing.

This quickly turns to the main thrust of the story: Glen (played by Ed Wood under the name of Daniel Davis) wants to marry Barbara (Dolores Fuller) but is worried she will not accept his cross-dressing. This climax (well, it does) with a dream-sequence – long if you see the producer’s cut which includes six tedious minutes of striptease and bondage footage; or just bewildering if you see the director’s cut, which excises all that and only sticks with Glen dreaming about Barbara and others ridiculing him with the help of Satan. His tormentors are cast aside as Glen emerges as his alter-ego, Glenda.  Glen then tells all to Barbara, who ultimately agrees to stick by Glen.

Coming back from the flashback, the doctor then realizes the movie is too short and goes into a quick narrative about Alan (“Tommy” Haynes), who undergoes an operation much like Jorgensen and thus squaring the deal for theater patrons (even if several were upset that they didn’t get to “see” anything in the operation). After Alan’s transformation into Ann (with a little bit of Bela’s magic), the doctor discusses speaking with Glen and Barbara and essentially telling Glen to knock it off with being Glenda.  Glen marries Barbara and is happy in his little love-shack with her, but the inspector is left to wonder about all the others still looking for their happy ending. And why he is breaking the fourth wall.  But mostly about their happy endings.

An example of the typical movie Glen or Glenda  got paired.

Thoughts:  I doubt anyone reading this needs to be told who Ed Wood Jr. is. If nothing else there’s the Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood with Johnny Depp that gives you a lot of background on Wood’s early career, even if it is in Disney-fied form (Burton was right to end it happily for the movie; to describes Wood’s later descent into alcoholism, poverty, and porn is hardly uplifting).

Wood had already been struggling to get noticed within the film and television business when he got the opportunity to do the movie.  With the news of Christine Jorgensen’s emergence in the newspapers as transgender in late 1952, Wood was working with Screen Classic producer George Weiss to make a movie called I Changed My Sex. That’s the title it was released with in April 1954, although it would also play some parts of the country as Glen or Glenda and then again starting in 1955 under the title, I Led Two Lives. The movie was a frequent second-feature up through the late 1960s, usually playing with tease or nudie films at drive-ins. With the developing “worst movie” cult of the late 1970s (cumulating to The Golden Turkey Awards in 1980), the movie got a second lease on life and continued to play with other features at theaters (typically drug-danger films like She Shoulda Said No!, covered by The Mads,  and Reefer Madness, done by RiffTrax).  Wood attempted to claim the movie was a documentary, with research involving “hundreds of people and psychiatrists. We had doctors supervising the operation scene.” Weiss, who those on the set later claimed did most of the heavy lifting to make sure Wood got usable footage, put his foot down by flatly stating, “We do exploitation pictures.”  Weiss would work with Wood again for a proposed movie called Rock and Roll Hell (featuring Wood crossdressing once again), but after money ran out, the footage was abandoned except for one fight scene that Wood would later use in The Sinister Urge (later on MST3K).

In an article with Aline Mosby from February 1953, both Weiss and Wood would make sure that everyone knew it was NOT about Jorgensen. Wood would claim that Bela’s character was “an all-powerful science-god figure. This is almost science fiction.” So that explains who Bela was supposed to be, I guess. Interesting side-note in the article is that “Tommy” Haines from the movie was actually a woman playing Alan/Ann.

Promotional still used to advertise the film after its release (Ohh! Chained for Life!)

The acting is all over the place, with no one really looking good, and there’s plenty of laughable dialogue in the film. However, it’s not too hard to look back at the movie as a rare moment of treating transgender in a sympathetic light for the era, even if misguided in a lot of ways. But that’s Wood for you – you laugh, you shake your head in disbelief, and then there’ll be one moment in most of his movies where everything comes together to make for some good filmmaking either by accident or design and you wonder what would have become of Wood if he had gotten the break he always wanted. That quickly passes and it’s all funny again, but for a moment there a brief glimpse of what could have been.

Favorite Riff: “Ironically, Glen’s car is a convertible.”

The Riffing: Once again, a lot of the details about how these things came about are covered in my book, The Worst We Can Find, but what it comes down to is after retiring from movie riffing, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff had been brought back into the fold when they begin working with Joel Hodgson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein riffing movies in a group called Cinematic Titanic (and we’ll be coming back to them in the days ahead, so don’t worry). That would continue through live performances and a series of video productions that brought back the silhouettes of MST3K, but in a different form. The series of performances would continue through the end of 2013.

An example of a nice callback early in The Mads' riffing!

By 2015, Joel was working on restarting MST3K, while Trace and Frank decided to continue with live riffing in a series of performances around the country as The Mads Are Back, which was done when time permitted from other projects they were working on. These live shows featured the two riffing to a “surprise” movie (and sometimes a second feature if there was a second performance later in the evening). The series of performances were doing well until 2019 when Frank needed to step away for a time to recover from heart surgery. They would tour a bit more after Frank’s recovery, but COVID-19 in 2020 further shut out the idea of doing live stage shows.

Instead, the two regrouped with producer Chris Gersbeck to do a live stream of their show via Zoom of Glen or Glenda, a film the pair had previously done in their live performances. The program featured the three introducing the show along with a short Q&A session afterwards. The broadcast was successful enough that the pair would continue on a monthly basis with a movie or a series of short subjects that can be purchased namely through Vimeo and of which some can be seen on Twitch and YouTube, and it would lead to development of the production company, Dumb Industries, which showcases even more programming for participants like Mary Jo Pehl (The Mary Jo Pehl Show and Movie Jo Night) and others.

No doubt some viewers would wonder how different The Mads are to RiffTrax or MST3K. As a fan, I would suggest it is much like as how you prefer your toast. MST3K is like light, buttery toast with its humor that tends to be non-offensive; RiffTrax is a darker piece of toast that hits better with coffee and flavored for a more adult taste. And then there’s The Mads, whose humor is like finding the toaster on fire. No, I kid – but their flavor of toast is probably the darkest of the three, with The Mads ready to drop the F-bomb when needed (the film pretty much starts with Bela looking in the camera as The Mads say in Bela’s voice, “What the F--- to you want?”) and not worried about political gags “offending someone.”  It may not make it everyone’s cup of riffing tea, but it’s funny for those who are prepared, and to see them present to us one of their early efforts in this form during COVID was a special treat, and still feels that way upon returning to it now. The movie is available free on YouTube through their official channel, so treat yourself by checking it out.