A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a transvestite (Glen or Glenda), the other of a pseudohermaphrodite (Alan or Anne).Ed Wood is often seen as a bad director, and this is often seen as a bad film (though not his worst). As I type this, IMDb gives it a 4.4 out of 10. Not atrocious, but still low. In my opinion, much too low.Yes, it is campy and is bloated with stock footage and scenes of Bela Lugosi that make no sense. But it also happens to be fun. And even if the science is not necessarily correct (I have my doubts about "curing" transvestites), it does have a favorable and progressive approach to gender that had to be unequaled in 1953.

Over half a century before Bruce Jenner decided to step out as a woman, Edward D. Wood Jr. came out with this daring, yet incompetently filmed would-be documentary about cross-dressing and sex changes. Wood, a notorious cross-dresser, insisted he was the perfect director for this subject, and with a budget smaller than the amount of change in a normal person's couch cushions, he sort of made a little movie about these themes. At just over an hour, this hodgepodge of stock footage, poorly written and acted scenes, odd fantasy sequences, and old Bela Lugosi rambling on about life and death is truly a finished product that defies a typical synopsis. "Pull the stringk!!" Lugosi shouts, and he theoretically represents some sort of a puppet master presiding over the human condition. Though Wood should be applauded for his courage in dealing with these subjects, one cannot forgive the incredible ineptitude with which this thing was thrown together. Some of its more interesting and racy moments were apparently thrown in post-production by the producer who obviously wasn't expecting any attempt at a thoughtful documentary from his director. The dramatic scenes deal with a young man (played by Wood under the pseudonym Daniel Davis) engaged to be married, but he's hiding a huge secret. The man loves to wear women's clothing, particularly angora sweaters! Should he tell his fiancée? How should he tell her? What if she doesn't want to marry a guy like that? The horrors! The scenes dealing directly with this plot make up about a third on the screen time. The biggest chunk of time has a doctor narrating about the differences between transvestites/homosexuals/hermaphrodites among many other things while at the same time explaining them to a police detective. It is in these scenes where some of the most laughable use of stock footage ever can be found. The funniest is perhaps where Wood has inserted footage of a steel mill and two off-screen blue collar types are talking about transsexuals while railroad rails are being forged out of molten steel and sparks are crashing all around! Other random shots of traffic and stampeding buffalo are thrown in. There is a suggestion that some random guy changing a light bulb in a rail yard might be wearing pink satin panties or something... hilarious!! The fantasy scenes go on for about 15 minutes, and make very little sense.Finally, we see the story of a WWII veteran who goes through a sex change. I'm sure they thought this was graphic back then, but its mostly a shot of doctors looking down at the patient while the narration explains in very general terms what is taking place. And the WWII veteran angle only gives Wood even more chances to throw in stock footage of soldiers in battle. The film's conclusion would probably not satisfy the militant LBGT (or is it LGBT?) community of today. It seems the doctor thinks and recommends that the young transvestite man can somehow be cured from his fetish, but I forgot how. Somehow his wife ends up taking the place of Glenda (his cross- dressing alter-ego) and they live happily ever after. Whatever. Anyway, give Wood some serious props for attempting to take a thoughtful look at trans-gender and transvestite issues at a time when they were probably only hinted at within the moldy pages of dime detective novels. 4 of 10 stars.The Hound

How can you describe Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? Well, it was supposed to be a biopic on Christine Jorgensen, the subject of the first, well-known, sex change, but Wood transformed the story into a semi- autobiography about his cross-dressing habit and how the society looks down on those like him.Essentially, this is a sociological docudrama about transvestites and pseudo-hermaphrodites, depicting tribal rituals and connecting them with contemporary social issues, laced with a slight comedic touch and filled with loads of idiosyncratic stock footage and featuring a narrator speaking cryptic, pseudo-philosophical, non-sequitur lines in a shlocky B-horror film spook-lab, but then it turns into an auto- biographic plea for compassion to viewers and follows two stories of two characters, intercut with strange nursery rhymes and interrupted by an impressionist/psychological horror-themed surrealist dream sequence featuring vignettes of sadomasochism, rape, religious imagery and an autoerotic session, only to shift back and forth between fourth wall-breaking reactions of both the narrator and the protagonist, in a 68-minute film with three separate narrators and NUMEROUS confusing flashbacks-within-flashbacks containing said narrations.We also learn that hats make you bald.Ed Wood certainly outdid himself on this one. It was shot in four days and starred his idol Bela Lugosi, in one of his last roles, as the narrator who sits in a chair the entire time and sometimes does chemical experiments. Wood played Glen under the pseudonym Daniel Davis, and his girlfriend Dolores Fuller was cast as Barbara.Glen or Glenda is a hysterical and entertaining movie, that is until the storyline unexpectedly starts following Alan instead of Glen, about 55 minutes in. Alan's storyline is also over-the-top, but considerably more boring than Glen's, which is an absolute riot. The scenes with Bela Lugosi are pure gold.

I feel really bad for Ed Wood. Not only was this movie a way for him to express his feelings, but it was also an attempt to get people to open their minds and accept people for who they are, which is a fantastic concept for a movie that was made in 1953. However, instead of getting an emotional narrative on the life of the transvestites and how they struggle to get people to accept and understand them (as well as their internal conflicts), we got a horribly narrated documentary type movie with abysmal acting and lazy writing. I don't even blame the concept of the film, because this (like I said before) could have been incredibly powerful and have more of the characters interacting with each other and trying to cope with society's hatred toward them, which in turn would get intolerant people attached to the characters, therefore causing them to question their beliefs. In fact, I think that this could have been one of the greatest movies of all time if the writing was not so dull and lifeless, if the acting was not laugh out loud ridiculous, and if it was not a god damn documentary type movie. Think about it, if more effort and editing was done to the script, if the actors had even a shred of talent (except for Bela Lugosi), and if it was more of a narrative than a documentary, it could have been a masterpiece.