Glen or Glena (1953)
Questions about Glen or Glenda
1.) Was this the longest short movie you have ever seen? I felt like I spent YEARS of my life watching this movie.
2.) Ed Wood’s personal stakes in this picture – how do you think that played into things?
3.) This is essentially two short films stitched together by a doctor speaking with a detective as a narrative thread. So you have Glen or Glenda starring Ed Wood with his then-girlfriend, Actress Delores Fuller. From what little I know about this flick, the Alan or Anne section that follows was composed of stitched-together b-roll footage to fulfill the producer’s request for a ‘sex-change’ picture, which Wood’s movie didn’t fulfill. Were you as confused as I was when all the war footage showed up after all the weird fetish stuff?
4.) Then the movie flips back to Glen or Glenda! So weird. It was like there was one short movie, and then the producer – George Weiss who did a ton of similarly goody stock-footage features.\
5.) Man, when you hit the 40 minute mark in this thing – wow does it wildly go off the rails. There’s all that Bela stuff with “Bevare! Bevare!” and then the bizarro expressionistic acting by Wood and Fuller. Then the devil shows up, but, like is he there because of the institution of marriage? And then all the weird fetist and exploitation stuff that apparently wasn’t even shot by Wood?
6.) That one lady gesturing at Lugosi from the doorway, with the white dress coming off her shoulders… her bizarre movements had me definitely wondering if Sam Raimi had seen Glen or Glena and modeled
7.) What the Hell is going on with Bela Lugosi in this one? “Snips and Snails and Puppy Dogg Tails.” Like, who is he supposed to be? He’s credited as The Scientist and sort of ties things up, by making the male versions of Glen and Alan disappear with a wave of his hand.
8.) What do you think of the way Wood uses the actor here? In this and other films, he used him even in ill health just to make sure he had a star to help sell his movies. Word is he was a drug addict due to a back problem and was paid only $1000.
Bottom Five Misleading Marquees
5.) Apocalpyse Now
1979 – dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Advertising the Marlon Brando is in this film was a bait and switch that few call as such because the movie is viewed as a masterpiece. I’ve spoken a bit Apocalypse Now when I recommended the documentary shot by Elenor Coppola about her husband’s descent into madness making the movie. Part of his descent was trying to get, and then work with, Marlon Brando who at this point in his career owed a lot to Coppola after the filmmaker gave him his latter day career bmp by casting him as Don Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather. And for anyone who has seen Apocalypse Now, the work by Brando that you see is… unremarkable, perhaps even head-scratching when compared to much of Brando’s output. In fact, I’d argue Brando’s appearance in the original edit of the movie is more of an extended cameo than it is a full role, this despite the fact that it is his face – not lead Martin Sheen’s – on the rather iconic movie poster. And the reason Brando was barely featured? In part it was that the production of the movie was already a titanic mess, but when the actor showed up significantly unfit for the role, was unable to memorize his lines, hadn’t read the source material for the constantly-revised screenplay AND wound up in a fight with co-star Dennis Hopper, Coppola did what he could to cobble something together. The result? A heavily-billed actor that appears mostly in shafts of shadow, mumbling disconnected lines while cross-cut with the graphic slaughter of a water buffalo. Most will agree that while Brando’s appearance in the film feels bigger than life, it’s ultimately a pretty big letdown after the preceding several hours of going upriver through Hell. Personally, I see the whole endeavor as a filmmaker in way over his head that had to find a way to market his film, so he leaned on whatever he could. Brando would mostly retire from acting in 1980, only a few short years later and the whole thing stinks of the way Ed Wood would try to milk every inch of star-power from Bela Lugosi.
4.) Psycho
1960 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock
This one is probably a bit of a cheat because the movie wears its misleading marquee as it’s calling card. The picture of course starts with Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who steals a good chunk of change from her real estate office job and runs off to be with her married co-worker. Established as our lead character, it then comes as an enormous surprise when she is murdered in the shower in one of the most stand-out sequences in cinematic history. The switcheroo Hitch pulls in this movie was so essential to the experience of watching the film, that it was advertised that the film has a “no late admission” policy so that no one would come into the film and have the surprise blown for them. Also, Hitchcock didn’t allow stars Leigh and Anthony Perkins to do any press for the movie, instead handling it all himself as he was obviously the rare case of a bankable star behind the camera. The switch works, but there’s no question that people going to see the lady on the movie poster in her underwear would be greatly surprised when she dies about halfway through. It was a tactic that would later be cashed in by the likes of Wes Craven for Scream (using Drew Barrymore) and even Renny Harlin in “Deep Blue Sea” with Samuel L. Jackson.
3.) Halloween Resurrection
2002 – dir. Rick Rosenthal
Another instance of a lead actress being dangled like a carrot to attract audiences, only to then reveal she’d barely be in the movie, “Halloween: Resurrection” pulled an early-inning “Psycho” using Janet Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis. In the preceding movie, Curtis’s Lori Strode had decapitated Michael and we all thought Halloween: H20 would be the end of it all. Nope. Somehow she killed an innocent paramedic with a crushed larynx, so Strode is back in H20 and is used as bait in a trap to catch Michael. All is well and good when the trap works, but when Lori second guesses herself and reaches to removed Michael’s mask to make sure it is actually him, he rams her through with a knife and tosses her off a roof! That’s all in, like, the first ten minutes, so what you end up with is… a reality-TV/found-footage cash-in that is widely considered the worst of the original 9 – yes NINE – Halloween movies. All that said, I kind of like this one and don’t feel it’s nearly as awful as everyone says, although the inclusion of Busta Rhymes as a reality TV host will forever be laughable to me. Gotta say too, Rick Rosenthal, who did Halloween II, rejoining the series, is an odd bit of trivia that I quite enjoy – especially as, behind Halloween II, this was likely his best movie.
2.) Heat
1995 dir. Michael Mann
So this misleading marquee is a bit different than the rest of my list because it’s not about a single actor or actress that’s misrepresented as a star for the sake of marketing and sales, but instead the combination of two actors for that same reason. The year is 1995, and Michael Mann – he of Miami Vice fame and a smattering of well-received films including the first Hannibal Lecter movie “Manhunter” and “Last of the Mohecans” starring Daniel Day Lewis – pulled together a big-budget reboot of a television pilot he’d attempted to get off the ground in the late 1970’s. This wasn’t news so much as the cast was: Mann had somehow done the impossible, pulled together a movie starring two of the most respected and well-renowned actors in cinema history who, prior to this, had only appeared in one other film together and never in the same scene. That original film? The Godfather II. The actors? Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. The result? A single scene. One damn scene. Yes, it’s a very, very good scene in a very, very good movie, but at the time, when it was sold as the coming-together of two top-of-their-game actors in a character-driven crime thriller, this seemed like an enormously exciting picture. And what do you get? One scene. If that’s not misleading, I don’t know what is!
1.) Every Bruce Willis movie made after 2018
This is a tough way to end a list, but I have to say there’s a good story to it. While a lot of internet pundits and critics have made hay with the latter-day output of Bruce Willis’s career, specifically the Razzie Awards who actually created a category specifically for Willis to run against himself for worst performance, the truth is Bruce Willis’s “involvement in films — even if for a fleeting few minutes — helped low-budget independent filmmakers sell their films internationally.” That’s a quote from an article in the Los Angeles times which counted the number of Willis-starring movies at 22 since 2018, 15 of which were done after 2019. 15 films in 2 years? And why? Unlike what happened to Bela Lugosi with Ed Wood – or even Marlon Brando with Coppola on Apocalypse Now – this was Willis making money off his own name. At an estimated $2 million per role for light work, the actor took agency over his latter day career and while some say he was exploited, I see him as savvy and smart to do what he did, which had to have been challenging. And audiences? Well, there were plenty who were dismayed by the output but upon revelation of his condition, most seem to agree that all cinematic sins are forgiven, with the Razzie awards retracting their category poking fun at the actor. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that, for more than a dozen titles in Bruce Willis’s body- of-work, we’re not seeing the actor we expect to see, but instead a hollow, sometimes sad imitation. For me this was even noticeable in M. Night’s Shymalan’s “Glass,” a movie that I was so excited for, and liked so much of, but ultimately was left wondering, Where was Bruce? In a role he had previously imbued with so much humanity and pathos, it seemed like the lights were out. I intitally perceived his work as lazy, but it turns out it was something much, much more severe. And while that’s a sad story in some ways, and a happy one in others, it’s also a misleading marquee if ever there was one. 22 or so of them to be specific.