I Want What I Want

The British cinema's response to 'The Christine Jorgensen Story' (1970). Five years after casting his wife Anne Heywood as a butch lesbian in 'The Fox' (1967), producer Raymond Stross showcased her as a troubled young male transsexual in this film of Geoff Brown's 1966 novel which bites off considerably more than it can chew.

Ms Heywood is sympathetic in the lead as conflicted young Roy - who would already have enough hang ups without his macho, ex-army father Harry Andrews - but receives little help from her makeup and costumes which make her look like a marionette from 'Joe 90' as 'Roy'. (Christine Jorgensen herself thought John Hansen made a more convincing girl in the former than Heywood did a boy). As 'Wendy' both his father and sister tell him he looks ridiculous in drag; but to me Heywood looks absolutely fab, and only too convincing as the seriously hot 40 year-old woman she actually was at the time. (As 'Roy' she looks more like a schoolboy than a grown man; a common side effect of female-to-male cross-dressing. I believe it's known as the 'Peter Pan Effect'.) Today's feminists would also rightly take issue with the notion that only a woman would manifest Roy's preference to discussing shoes and fabrics to politics.

The film abandons 'Roy' surprisingly early on to concentrate for most of the running time on his efforts to pass as 'Wendy', and ends very abruptly. But it certainly makes you think about 'her' loneliness, her efforts to find work and build a new life without references from her former employer or a birth certificate; and the daily balancing act 'she' has to perform to pass as a woman without men getting too interested in 'her'.