Edward D Wood Jr | Through the Shattered Lens

Today is the 100th birthday of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the director who is often referred to as being “the worst director of all time.” Personally, I’ve never really agreed with that title. Ed Wood had a long career in Hollywood and yes, he may have worked exclusively in B-movies and yes, he eventually turned to softcore and then hardcore porn to pay the bills and yes, his life ended under rather tragic circumstances. But, unlike most truly bad directors, his films are still being watched today and, again unlike most bad directors, his style is immediately recognizable. You don’t need to see his name in the credits to know when a film was directed by Ed Wood. You just have to keep an eye out for stock footage, a few familiar actors, and a lot of angora.

If anything, Ed Wood was a director whose ambitions far outweighed the money that he could usually raise for his films. On the one hand, Plan 9 From Outer Space was a film where the strings holding the flying saucers were clearly visible and where a shower curtain was used to represent the door into an airplane’s cockpit. On the other hand, it was also a very sincere plea for world peace and a lament that humans would rather blow themselves up with Solarnite than work out their differences.

Or you take a film like 1953‘s Glen or Glenda. Ed Wood, who identified as a heterosexual and who was considered, by his friends, to be quite a womanizer (and it should be noted that young Ed Wood was strikingly handsome, though he was subsequently very badly aged by alcoholism and homelessness), also preferred to wear clothing designed for women and was open about it at a time when American culture was even more conformist-minded than usual. In Glen or Glenda, Wood plays the autobiographical role of Glen, who struggles to tell his fiancée (played by Wood’s real-life girlfriend, Delores Fuller) that he dreams of being able to wear her angora sweater. Glen’s story is told by a psychiatrist (Timothy Farrell) who is talking to a cop (veteran Hollywood character actor Lyle Talbot) who is investigating the death of a transvestite. Among other things, Glen or Glenda is known for its bad acting, stiffly delivered dialogue, and its occasional digressions about why men go bald while women do not. (It’s the tight-fitting hats, which cut-off blood flow to the head and not only cause men to lose their hair but also develop the Solarnite bomb.) But, at the same time, it’s a film in which Wood attempts to handle, with sensitivity and empathy, a subject that most films in the 50s would have either ridiculed or portrayed as being a threat to the American way of life. All of Wood’s films are sympathetic to those who are considered to be outsiders by conventional society. This is especially true of Glen or Glenda.

Of course, Glen or Glenda is also known for Bela Lugosi randomly appearing in a laboratory and shouting things like, “Pull ze string! Pull ze string!” As far as I can tell, Lugosi is supposed to be playing the creator, who is not portrayed as being a stereotypical God but instead as being a mad scientist who rants and raves in his library and his laboratory. And while it’s obvious that Bela was probably added to the film at the last minute and, more or less, allowed to do whatever the Hell he wanted, his presence adds a wonderfully bizarre touch to film’s dry style. (I would compare him to the mysterious burned man who appears at the start of David Lynch’s Eraserhead.) Whenever the film starts to get a bit too much like an educational film, Lugosi pops up and starts to literally shout at the audiences, frantically issuing a bunch of commands and nursery school rhymes that don’t really made any sense. It reminds one of H.P. Lovecraft’s insistence that the universe was created by a blind idiot God who had no idea that he was actually creating anything. The presence of Lugosi and a lengthy and increasingly surreal dream sequence in which Glen imagines himself being tormented by both his fiancée and the devil all suggest that, under different circumstances, Ed Wood could have been the American Buñuel.

Sadly, it was not to be. Ed Wood died in alcoholic poverty and was reportedly pretty miserable during the final years of his life. There was nothing pleasant about the end of Wood’s life. But, on his birthday, I think the least we can do is remove the title of “worst director” from his legacy. He was nothing of the sort.

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The 1958 film, The Bride and the Beast, tells the story of newlyweds Dan (Lance Fuller) and Laura Fuller (Charlotte Austin). Dan is an overly macho and chauvinistic big game hunter who is so into hunting and capturing animals that he even keeps a gorilla named Sparky in the basement of his home. I’m not really sure that’s legal and, even if it is, the logistics of keeping a gorilla in your home seem like they would be beyond the capabilities of moron like Dan. Then again, when Sparky gets loose and tries to attack Laura, Dan is forced to shoot him. So, I guess the movie was kind enough to prove my point.

Laura, though grateful to be alive, cannot stop thinking about Sparky and soon, she’s having dreams about her past life as a gorilla. Because Dan doesn’t believe that his wife was once a gorilla, he takes her to the jungles of Africa for their honeymoon. While Dan proves himself to be not quite the ideal romantic husband by keeping himself busy by hunting a killer tiger, Laura finds herself being drawn back to her former existence as the Queen of the Gorillas. Dan may be able to save his camp from the tiger but will he be able to save his wife from the primates that want her for their bride? And will Laura maybe be smart enough to realize that a normal husband would not react to his new bride hatred of hunting for forcing her to go on a safari for her honeymoon? I mean, really, everything that happens in this film is pretty much Dan’s fault. Here’s hoping that Laura divorced him and married a smarter 50s hero. Like maybe Jeff the pilot from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Now that was a man!

This very low-budget film, which is full of stock footage and sets that wobble whenever any of the actors bump into them, has gained some attention in recent years because the script was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. As such, there’s a scene in which Laura undergoes hypnosis and delivers a monologue about how much she loves her angora sweater. (“It felt like the fur of a small kitten.”) The nonsensical plot and dialogue could only have come from Ed Wood. Unfortunately, Wood himself didn’t direct the film. That job falls to Adrian Weiss and, as a result, the film’s direction doesn’t feature any of the quirky weirdness that one typically associates with a Wood production. The film gets off to a good start, with Dan revealing that he keeps a gorilla in his basement and coming across like some sort of mad scientist but, once the action moves to the jungle, things start to drag as Weiss takes a bland and workmanlike approach to a story that demanded a more imaginative approach.

The film does conclude on an enjoyably odd note, one in which overly macho Dan discovers that it takes more than a rifle and a hunting hat to be king of the jungle. In the end, though, this film is mostly just for Ed Wood completists.