Of the directors who worked on the fringes of Hollywood, no one was farther removed from the center of Tinseltown than Edward D. Wood Jr.
Ed Wood made his films when and where he could, raising financing himself, renting small sound stages to construct his fantasy worlds, and working with Hollywood talent whose best days were largely behind them.
Critics have tended to either dismiss Wood as an over-earnest failure, or have embraced his films for their “camp” aesthetic. I tend to fall somewhere more in-between these two assessments of Wood’s films. It’s too easy to laugh along at them, as if they were simply made to poke fun at themselves. There’s a seriousness to both his themes and his ambitions (no matter how short he may have fallen from achieving them) that is impossible to deny.
The films of Ed Wood can be said to push the limits of the “auteur theory” to their breaking point. Yes, his films are distinctly his, but does that justify further study?
Hailing from Poughkeepsie, New York, Ed Wood arrived in Hollywood in 1947 with a background in theater (and military experience in World War II). His early years in Hollywood have been documented elsewhere (Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. is a particularly good source). Wood approached filmmaking armed with an extensive knowledge and love for the B-pictures, serials and programmers he’d grown up watching. In fact, one of his earliest attempts at making a film was a short, independent effort that he apparently hoped to sell to television, called Crossroads of Laredo. It has since been restored, and is available on DVD. The film is basically a straightforward Western, and is generally unremarkable, though to be fair it was an amateur, independent effort.
It was Glen or Glenda, made in 1952, that was Wood’s “big break” into filmmaking. It is certainly one of the strangest films ever made. On the one hand an intensely personal story about transvestism, its producer also padded it out with scenes that have the feel of something straight out of an exploitation picture. It’s tempting to speculate what the film would have been like had Wood had the right to final cut. While it no doubt would have still suffered from many of the same flaws that plague it and other Wood films, it would have been interesting to see Wood tell such a personal story without the unnecessary scenes cut in by the producer to enhance its exploitation value. Wood treated the subject with dignity and respect, and it’s a pity that the final film was twisted to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the material.
Wood’s next film, Jail Bait, was released in 1954, and is decidedly less interesting than Glen or Glenda. It’s a story of a criminal who gets plastic surgery to hide his identity from the police! Notable today mainly for the screen debut of Steve Reeves, the film is also an interesting chance to see Ed Wood working with material outside of his usual science-fiction fare with which he would become most closely identified. The problem with Jail Bait is that it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a straight police drama, or a kind of noirish exploration of a criminal on the run. The film is entirely too “black-and-white” in its simplicity between the “bad guys” and the “good guys” to achieve the kind of existentialist graying of such labels that a film noir would require, but at the same time, lacks the kind of narrative thrust of the best police procedurals. As a result, the film just falls flat, and remains perhaps the least memorable Wood film that is commercially available.
Bride of the Monster, on the other hand, is just about the best film Wood ever made. It rises to the level of being a genuinely enjoyable, solid little B-movie. With performances by icons like Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson, it’s not hard to see the film’s appeal. Certainly, there are the standard Wood plot contrivances and absurdities (such as Lugosi’s demise at the tentacles of an octopus), and the occasionally un-ignorably shoddy production values, but all in all, it’s an entertaining film from start to finish, and the assured hand of Wood’s direction helps the viewer overlook the flaws. It’s one Wood film in which the “suspension of disbelief” is quite possible!
Without question, Wood’s most famous film is his 1959 “masterpiece”, Plan 9 From Outer Space. For better or worse, this was the film that helped put Wood back on the map, when it was included in books like The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time. However, such a condescending attitude toward the film only helps its reputation in the most superficial sense, by bringing the title back to public attention. The film’s reputation could be said to be living testament to the adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”.
But to dismiss the film as a failure (that is, if one even considers it a failure) without understanding what went wrong would be a mistake. Ed Wood achieved what many aspiring filmmakers only dream of – actually completing his film in the face of all odds. He managed to turn the film into the final “starring” vehicle of Bela Lugosi, just by using some footage he’d shot of Lugosi for an unrelated project shortly before the actor’s death in 1956. The film features iconic performances by both long-time Wood regular Tor Johnson, and local nighttime-TV host Vampira. Perhaps more than any other of Wood’s films, though, this one suffers from noticeably poor production values, such as the tomb stones that wobble when the actors fall down, or the “grass” in the cemetery that slides underneath the actors’ feet. There are a number of nighttime and daytime shots that are badly matched. Such moments are the result of the extremely rushed and chaotic production circumstances that Wood was working under.
However, to dwell on these aspects is, perhaps, to miss the bigger picture. It would be easy to laugh at the film for its slipshod production elements. But when you pay attention to what Wood is actually conveying through the film, you begin to realize what a genuinely ambitious effort the project was. By attacking the brute strength of military power in the face of powerful new weapons like the atom bomb, Wood was – in his own way – dealing with the kinds of large themes that the best science fiction work addresses.
It’s impossible to overlook the shortcomings of Ed Wood’s films. To argue that such elements are “intentional” and to dismiss them as camp is to do a disservice to Wood himself. It’s hard to watch his films and not detect the earnestness and seriousness behind the ideas he was trying to convey.
Perhaps the ultimate testament to his work is the fact that, more than 30 years after his death, film fans still know the name “Ed Wood”, and are still talking about his work. It’s hard to think of a better legacy than that.
