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.
The other night, I watched the 1951 film Racket Girls with a select group of friends. We get together every Saturday night and watch a movie. Usually, the movie’s pretty bad. (For instance, we watched Disco Beaver From Outer Space one night.) Still, I think Racket Girlsmight be the worst film we’ve seen to date.
Racket Girls tells the story about how the mob infiltrated the sport of professional wrestling. Umberto Scali (Timothy Farrell) and his little friend Joe (Don Ferrara) make their living managing female wrestlers but it turns out that the wrestling hall is really a front for all of Umberto’s illegal activities. We’re told that there’s a lot of illegal activities going on but we don’t really see many of them. Anyway, Umberto borrows too much money from Mr. Big and then he gets the police mad at him and it looks like it all might lead to a bad end for Umberto and his little friend Joe.
Or maybe not. Who knows? This movie is only a 67 minutes long but it’s next to impossible to actually follow the plot. To be honest, I found the complete lack of background music to be more interesting than the plot itself. It gave the film a strangely existential feel. There’s no music. There’s no entertainment. There’s just a lot of wrestling and bullets.
In fact, I’d say that the film is 75% wrestling, which …. well, I guess whether or not that works depends on whether or not you’re a fan of grainy professional wrestling footage. I’m not a huge fan, though I’ve seen some good wrestling movies that were smart enough to explore the real people behind the outsized personas. In Racket Girls, no one really has a personality and no one has a persona either. There’s a lot of overhead shots of a wrestling ring and we hear what sounds like a crowd cheering even though we never actually see them. It’s actually a bit of an odd effect. It makes the wrestling scenes seem positively surreal. I kept waiting for that strange radiator woman from Eraserhead to step out in the ring and start singing, In Heaven, Everything Is Fine….
Anyway, the film does make a legitimate point about mob’s influence in professional sports. Umberto, it should be noted, doesn’t appear to be a very smart gangster. That’s his downfall. Still, if you enjoy watching movie featuring tough guys in black suits threatening each other …. well, this film probably still isn’t for you. I mean, a few of the actors playing the gangsters have got the look down but no one’s particularly convincing. It’s like a community theater production of The Sopranos or something. It’s like they remade Scarface with Justin Bieber.
As I watched this film, I found myself wondering whether or not Ed Wood was involved because the film just feels like an Ed Wood production. Also, it should be noted that Racket Girls was produced by George Weiss, who produced several of Wood’s films and that star Timothy Farrell appeared in at least 3 Wood-directed films. Ed Wood’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credit but I swear, this film has his finger prints all over it.
I’m probably making Racket Girls sound more amusing than it actually is. This is an incredibly boring movie. My friends nearly abandoned me about ten minutes into the movie and that hardly ever happens. I had to beg them to stay and watch the rest of the film. (I told them that there was a cartoon coming up that featured the first appearance of Bobba Fett. That was the same line I used to keep them from abandoning me two years ago when we were watching The Star Wars Holiday Special.) This is an offer that you can refuse. In fact, you should refuse it.
The drama continues: I received a call from FedEx about the status of my new DirecTV receiver (the old one being fried beyond repair) . The new box is now sitting in a warehouse, undeliverable because DIRECTV GAVE THEM THE WRONG ADDRESS!! You’d think after almost two years they’d have my address, right? Wrong! FedEx told me I have to call DirecTV and have them fix the address or drive an hour out of my way to pick it up myself. So I proceeded to call the corporate beast and was transferred to a woman who barely spoke English, gave her all my information, then was transferred to another woman who spoke even worse English and repeated the process all over again! After a half hour of this nonsense, I was then told I’d have to wait an additional 3-5 days before my new box arrives… hopefully at the right address! ARRRGGGGHH!!!!
If I haven’t already made it clear in my previous reviews on this site, I love exploitation films. Regardless of whether they’re blaxploitation or gialli or whether they’re about zombies or cannibals or just people looking for revenge, I love everything about them. I love them because they’re shameless, they’re frequently incoherent, and occasionally, they’re works of pure (if fractured) genius.
However, I have a special place in my heart for the old school exploitation films of the 1930s and 40s. These are the exploitation movies that came out while the American film industry still operated under the puritanical production code. While the mainstream film industry was still struggling with the idea of Clark Gable saying “damn” onscreen, the underground B-movie makers were making the movies that everyone saw but few people ever talked about. These were low-budget movies, filmed on the cheapest stock available and often times edited with all the skill of a chainsaw-wielding maniac. And while these movies were not necessarily impressive technically, they continue to serve as proof that even our elders occasionally enjoyed a dirty joke.
For the most part, these exploitation films were disguised as being public service announcements. Hence, a film like Ruined Souls wasn’t just a movie about young people skinny dipping and having sex. No, it was a warning about the dangers of venereal disease. Typically, once the film had finished showing off all the bad behavior it could, an authority figure (usually a doctor) would show up and explain why those in the audience shouldn’t do any of the things they had just watched. There’s a shamelessness to these old school exploitation films that reminds me why I admire panhandlers who go through the trouble to come up with an entertaining way to ask me for my money.
1948’s Test Tube Babies(directed by W. Merle Connell and produced by George Weiss, who would produce most of Ed Wood’s early films) is a typical example of an old school exploitation film. Now the title might lead you to think that this is going to be another horror film about demonic children. However, the exact opposite is true. The message of Test Tube Babies (the film’s PSA) is that any marriage — regardless of how drab and dull — can be saved by forcing the wife to go through hours of excruciatingly painful labor.
The first half of Test Tube Babies plays out roughly like the 1st half of Revolution Road. A boring young man named George meets a frumpy young woman named Cathy. They’re attracted to each other and, since this is the 1940s after all, they get married so that they can have sex. George and Cathy go on a whirlwind honeymoon. They get a house in the suburbs. George gets a job and Cathy settles into the life of being a slave (or “housewife,” as it was apparently known in the 1940s.)
However, is it possible that there is trouble in paradise? Shortly after the honeymoon is concluded, we start to get hints that maybe Cathy isn’t entirely satisfied being an indentured servant. At the breakfast table, Cathy and George talk about how boring their social life is. When George’s womanizing friend Frank comes to visit, Cathy greets him in her nightie and proceeds to dance with him while a simmering George watches. What’s wrong with Cathy? Could it be that she’s suddenly realized that she’s surrendered her own identity just to be someone’s wife? Perhaps it has dawned on her that marriage is really just a societal invention that’s designed to keep anyone from truly challenging the status quo. Or maybe she just needs a child to give her an excuse to remain in a loveless charade of a marriage.
Regardless of the reason why, Cathy is clearly dissatisfied with her new life. Soon, once George is off at work, Cathy invites all of her decadent friends over to the house for a party. This party appears to be the 1940s version of a key party. As Cathy plays hostess, Frank proceeds to make out with another man’s wife and then, from out of nowhere, an elderly lady with bleached blond hair shows up and starts talking about her former life as a burlesque dancer. As Cathy watches in horror (no doubt wondering why she couldn’t have just listened to her husband like a good, dutiful slave), the dancer starts to dance and things quickly escalate until Cathy is finally forced to call George at work and beg him to come home.
One of the reasons I love these old school exploitation films is that they provide a chance to see what our grandparents considered to be risqué. It’s a chance to peer into the repressed sexuality of our elders. So, what can we learn from watching the party scene in Test Tube Babies?
1) To judge from the leering reaction given to the frumpy clothing worn by the female guests, Sears was apparently the Victoria’s Secret of the 1940s.
2) The entire party sequence ends with a bizarre catfight between two women, over the course of which both women somehow end up naked. This serves to prove that, much as I always suspected, men have always been the same.
In a plot development that was later shamelessly ripped off by Revolution Road, all of this suburban decadence leads to Cathy and George realizing how empty their “perfect” sham of a marriage really is. Whereas Kate Winslet decided that this emptiness was linked to her sacrificing her own identity to be a wife, Cathy decides that the marriage is empty because she’s not yet a mother. After all, what could be better than bringing another human being into the world for the sole purpose of justifying a failed marriage? Never mind that neither George nor Cathy comes across like the type of people who could actually raise a happy child. What’s important here is to go through the societal motions.
Cathy, of course, wants to get pregnant immediately because you know us women. We’re just slaves to the old biological clock. However, despite George’s best efforts, Cathy simply cannot get knocked up. She wonders if maybe something’s wrong with her. George is quick to agree that something could be wrong with her so, like any good American couple, they go to a doctor to specifically find out what’s wrong with the wife.
(Interestingly enough, just to judge from the movie’s dialogue and the fact that Cathy is shocked when told to undress before being examined, it would appear that this is not only the first time that she’s ever been to a gynecologist but perhaps the first time she’s even heard the term “gynecologist.” To judge from this movie, apparently women in the 40s were simply locked up in the attic until some idiot came by and paid their dowry.)
It’s here that the movie takes a truly shocking turn as it is revealed that — gasp! — nothing is wrong with the wife. Instead, George is sterile. And this, of course, leads us to the whole concept of test tube babies and how they can even save the most pointless of marriages.
Now, the filmmakers obviously knew that this would a bitter pill for a 1948 audience to swallow so, in order to make sure we understand that this sort of thing actually does happen, we are introduced to Dr. Wright. If for no other reason, see this movie for Dr. Wright. With his oily hair, his ever-present smirk, and an equally ever-present cigarette, Dr. Wright is probably the creepiest gynecologist this side of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. As played by exploitation vet Timothy Farrell, Dr. Wright is the only character in the film to seem to realize that he’s surrounded by idiots.
In the great tradition of old school exploitation, Dr. Wright is used to explain and justify the concept of a test tube baby. By doing so, Dr. Wright justifies and excuses all of the “decadence” that has previously been put up on-screen. Dr. Wright also makes a good argument for the health benefits of cigarettes. Seriously, I have never seen a doctor smoke as much as Dr. Wright. Literally, his every scene is enveloped in a cloud of smoke. He smokes while conducting a consultation, he smokes in between operations, and apparently he even smokes while conducting his examinations. (Which reminds me of a story concerning an ex-boyfriend but the less said about that the better…) Perhaps his best scene comes when, spying a nervous George in a hospital waiting room, Dr. Wright suggests that George “smoke a cigarette and relax.” (“I’ve already gone through two packs!” George replies and everyone shares a cancerous laugh.)
In the end,what can you really say about this odd little time capsule? As far as old school exploitation is concerned, it’s not a classic in the way that a movie like Reefer Madness is. Still, the movie holds a strange fascination for me. Some of it, of course, is the whole “so-good-that-its-bad” factor. This movie has that in spades. However, I think an argument can be made that movies like Test Tube Babies provide a view into the American subconscious that more mainstream films simply can not. Freed up from the confines of the Hollywood production code, the old school exploitation movies could give the people what they wanted to see as opposed to what they felt they should want to see.
Perhaps that’s the real appeal of a movie like Test Tube Babies. Its proof that people were fucked up before any of us were born and that they’ll continue to be fucked up long after we’re gone.
Then again, perhaps I’m just reading too much into an amusingly bad B-movie.
Perhaps it would be best to give the movie the final word…
Through the Shattered Lens 