sissymaidlola
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OK, so who is/are your favorite big screen crossdressed male performer(s) over the last fifty odd years ? Or if you prefer, which is/are your favorite tranny movie role(s) from that period ? Or if you would prefer yet another perspective to approach this poll from ... which was your favorite movie with a gender-bending theme during the second half of the 20th century ? [Note: currently the oldest movie in this poll is the first-listed Cary Grant movie, which was released in 1949, and the latest movie in the poll is "Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil" which was released in 1997.]
Text updated 3/28/05 by sissy maid lola
sissy Apologizes that he limited his initial poll to only ten movies, but he was under the impression that that was the maximum limit allowed for the number of options in a CollarMe poll (his having not seen any other poll here with more than ten options offered until today). Therefore, much of the rationalization that sissy wrote in this OP for why he excluded certain movies from his short list of ten no longer applies, and it has now been rewritten below.
This poll was originally initiated as a list of ten gender-bending / tranny-themed movies together with a rationalization (the original version of this OP) for why those ten had been chosen while all others had been excluded. At the time of the OP there were three or four movies on sissy's list that he really regetted having to omit (see below), and by the end of the week he had remembered another half-dozen more, so he initiated a second (PART II) poll that included all of these additional movies at the Easter weekend. In perfect accord with Murphy's Law, today sissy discovered that the number of options that can be offered in a poll is certainly much larger than ten - it's at least thirty, and probably much more than that. Accordingly, the ten movies that were in the "PART II" poll have now been added at the bottom of this one ... and clearly further movies can also be added to these.
The original ten movies in the poll had been listed in chronological order (from 1949 to 1996), but the additional ten movies completely overlapped this time span (1969 to 1997) and so they could only be appended to the original list, rather than interspersed with it, if existing votes cast for the first ten movies were to be preserved. Currently, the first fourteen movies (with the exception of one that is misplaced) are still listed in chronological release date order (running from 1949 to 1997), with the last six movies being listed in reverse chronological release date order (running from 1990 to 1969). Any additional movies that are appended to the poll at this point will continue to make the list order even more arbitrary.
Why the following movies were included
The main purpose of initiating the second poll was to rectify some of the obvious oversights / intentional omissions in the first poll for tranny movies from the sixties, seventies and eighties. The three movies that sissy originally omitted from the poll that he particularly regretted leaving out were:
- Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" (originally titled in the French "Le Locataire")
- George Roy Hill's "The World According to Garp"
- Beeban Kidron's "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"
and the three movies that were included in their place, with some possible regrets, were "Psycho", the Cary Grant movie, and both versions of "La Cage aux Folles" (where perhaps only one of the two would have sufficed). However, sissy included those three instead because sissy is a huge admirer of film directors Mike Nichols and Alfred Hitchcock (and "Psycho" is probably Hitchcock's quintessential movie) as well as also being a big fan of Cary Grant.
Ruminating some about whether he should really have included the film "Psycho" or not - and since he did include it, why not also include any of its sequels - made sissy remember Brian De Palma's own homage to (or, depending on your viewpoint, rip-off of) this classic movie ... "Dressed to Kill". Once again, soft sweet transvestites are falsely depicted on the big screen as psychopathic killers! How sissy came to overlook this movie for his first list of ten he'll never know.
Similarly, the movie "Nuns on the Run" must have flown under sissy's radar back in 1990 when it was released ... as sissy is a big Monty Python / Eric Idle addict he is not quite certain how that one got past him. So many thanks to Mercnbeth for adding that one to the second list of ten movies. The plot of that film makes it sound like "Some Like it Hot" meets Dudley Moore's Leaping Nun of Norwich character from "Bedazzled" !!
Thinking of Dudley Moore made sissy think of Liza Minelli which in turn made him remember Bob Fosse's 1972 classic movie "Cabaret" ... which was essentially a whole burlesque / drag fest centered around the Kit-Kat Club in Berlin in the early thirties just as the Nazis were coming to power. The problem sissy had with this movie was identifying a specific transvestite character / role in the movie ... and thinking harder about it made sissy then remember the 1969 tasteless but classic Luchino Visconti movie "La Caduta degli dei" (renamed "The Damned" for the American market) which was set in the same timeframe and location as "Cabaret" and focused on the Machiavellian rise to power under the Third Reich of a murderous transvestite pedophilic mother-rapist from upper German class nobility! Continuing sissy's lousy analogies, "The Damned" is "Cabaret" meets "A Clockwork Orange" !!
Contemplating films that might be in bad taste made sissy remember another classic transvestite movie from around that period ... the 1972 exercise in ultra-bad taste by movie maverick John Waters known as Pink Flamingos. This low-budget movie directed by John (a.k.a. the Prince of Puke and the Pope of Trash) brought us yet another collaborative performance from the real-life transvestite actor Divine who played the 200+ pound doggy-poop eating white trash pink trailer park drag queen Babs Johnson. In addition to Babs - who was promoted as the "filthiest person alive" together with her egg-eating mother, chicken-loving son and voyeuristic "companion" - the film also featured chick-with-a-dick Elizabeth Coffey, a pre-op M2F transsexual who had already undergone hormone therapy to develop breasts and female features at the time of filming in Miami.
And talking of transsexuals brings sissy to two further movies he left out of his original ten because the gender-bending roles were TS/TG rather than TV:
- Richard Spence's "Different for Girls" (a.k.a. "Crossing the Border")
- Clint Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"
The former movie got somewhat mixed reception from cinema audiences, but the latter title is both a truly great novel as well as a very popular classic film whose larger-than-life TS character, the Lady Chablis, needs no further justification for inclusion in this poll.
Finally, the 1992 movie "Just Like a Woman" is one of the few serious, rather than comedic, movies in both polls that addresses real transvestitism head on. Rather than the crossdressing being a sub-plot (as the TG nature of Dil is in "The Crying Game" or John Lithgow's TS character is in "Garp") the whole movie is actually focused on the main story of two lovers learning to understand and cope with the one partner's need to crossdress. Furthermore, this main gender-bending character (Gerald/ine) is a heterosexual transvestite struggling with the true nature of his sexuality rather than a thespian or female impersonator, a psychopathic killer, a homosexual drag queen, or someone that crossdresses due to some rather unbelievable set of circumstances. As such, this is one of sissy's personal favorites of the twenty movies listed in this poll.
Why the following movies were excluded
sissy Makes no apologies for ignoring the movie "Victor / Victoria". Besides the fact that Julie Andrews plays a crossdressed female performer in that film (although she is shacked up with a male drag queen who would have qualified as the male nominee), that movie blew large chunks IsHO - as much as sissy loves most of Blake Edwards' other films, particularly the Pink Panther series, that particular movie probably represents the nadir of his movie-making career. 
The infamous Ed Woods' movie "Glen or Glenda" also got the big elbow because it was a little too cheesy (like almost all his movies!) and was "Calamity Jane" really a gender-bending movie ? i don't think so! The Joan Crawford movie "Johnny Guitar" also didn't make the grade ... mostly because sissy hasn't seen it, hee, hee, hee ... hey, it's his poll, so screw you, buddy!
Other "close but no cigar" movies were "Goodbye Charlie" starring Debbie Reynolds and Tony Curtis (some times sissy wonders how Mr. Curtis ever acquired his macho screen image) and "The Christine Jorgensen Story" (hey, helloooo ... a post-op TS is NOT a crossdresser!), and transsexual drag queen movie "Myra Breckenridge" (maybe next poll ... any excuse to think about Raquel Welsh and Mae West, eh!). 
The crossdressing and gender-bending in "Yentl" and "Just One of the Guys" movies are both of the wrong kind ... remember this is a MTF CD movie poll, not an FTM CD movie fest! Maybe sissy should do a separate poll on just that topic ? (oh shit, then sissy will have to include "Victor / Victoria" ... so perhaps better that he not, eh ?). Finally, sissy never saw the movie "Mascara" so unfortunately it didn't make the grade, either.
One of sissy's all time favorite movies is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's original "Bedazzled" - not the pathetic nineties remake! - but he was not able to determine the name of Dudley Moore's Leaping Nun of Norwich character ... anyways, most people wouldn't really consider it a gender-bending movie now, would they ?
Well that pretty well covers all the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties movies with a transvestite or crossdressing theme that sissy could remember ... but he is certain to have screwed up and, even after two attempts at this, still missed a few more, so if you can think of one that you feel has been seriously overlooked, please post it below. Two movies with tranny themes that immediately come to mind that still haven't been included yet are Woody Allen's "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask" which contains a whole transvestite vignette starring Canadian actor Lou Jacobi, and Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man" which contained a native American Berdache character called Little Horse who was what the Cheyenne call a "hee-man-eh". Far from being a "he-man" ... the term "hee-man-eh" meant that he was a transgendered male that dressed and lived full time as a squaw.
The nineties decade probably saw the release of as many CD / transgendered themed movies as the total of all the previous decades of film making, and this rate of release continues unabated in the 21st century. This poll originally contained four movies from the nineties, and this has now been extended to nine with the addition of the second group, and there are easily enough GOOD tranny-themed movies from 1997 - 2005 still not mentioned, which when added to the few CD or gender-bending movies that were made prior to 1949, might possibly make for another poll by itself (but don't hold your breath for that one!).  Hopefully the eleven pre-nineties movies listed in this poll represent the best of the well known gender-bending films of the 1950s through the 1980s ... but if they don't, since the limit on the number of movies that can be included in the poll is much higher than sissy originally thought, post a message on this thread stating what has been overlooked and the movie(s) can possibly be included.
Regards,
sissy maid lola
< Message edited by sissymaidlola -- 4/3/2005 10:59:01 AM >
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