| I have long thought that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night could be improved by the inclusion of a pair of Groucho Marx eyeglasses. You know, those plastic novelty specs with the rubber nose, fake moustache and big, tufty eyebrows. Twelfth Night revolves around a female protagonist named Viola who spends much of the play disguised as a man. Why make her disguise a complex one? Stick a schnozz on her and turn her into Groucho, I say. The audience will see through the disguise, as it is supposed to, and the other characters can pretend to be taken in, which they have to do anyway. It’s a comedy, so any explosion of mirth the disguise might cause is welcome. The actress playing Viola can change into and out of her disguise with extreme rapidity, if necessary, and even the most impoverished of theatre companies can keep a few extra pairs of nose glasses in the wings in case of breakage. They’re pretty cheap.
Disguises in the movies run the gamut from elaborate facial surgery (Face/Off (1997) to a tin of shoe polish and a funky walk (Silver Streak (1976)). Even the humble Groucho glasses made a guest appearance in Going in Style (1979), in which they concealed the identities of a trio of aging bank robbers. Can movie disguises get any more minimal than these dime store novelties?
Well, yes.
· Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993) – Not only is this Oscar-winning animated short hysterically funny, it even manages some genuine suspense with its Hitchcockian tale of crime and deception. Feathers McGraw, the villainous penguin, manages to be cute and sinister at the same time due to his complete lack of facial expression. While committing an ingenious heist, he disguises himself as a chicken simply by wearing a rubber glove on his head.
· E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) —You’re a little kid, trying to hide your stumpy alien friend from sinister grown-ups. What do you do? Throw a sheet over his head and disguise him as a ghost, of course. Warning – this only works on Halloween.
· Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) – It’s a well-known fact that if you throw on a monk’s robe in Ming the Merciless’s castle, the guards will think you’re just some kind of spiritual advisor, and let you wander around wherever you please. This cheapass cliffhanger serial takes this premise to ridiculous new depths. At one point, the brilliant and heroic Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon) is thrown into Ming’s dungeon, where he strikes up a friendship with another prisoner who has secretly been working on a disguise for several years. The disguise is simply a monk’s robe, and when Zarkov puts it on, the guards let him out of the cell without a word, apparently assuming that a monk simply wandered into the locked prison cell by mistake.
· Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940) – Who needs superpowers? The hero of this exciting serial is just a guy in a tailored suit who occasionally dons a chainmail mask and fights crime as "The Copperhead." When the time comes to change back into his daytime persona, he simply tucks the mask into his pocket, and nobody notices that he’s wearing the same suit as the superhero who was wrestling with Doctor Satan just a minute ago. At one point, Doctor Satan himself comes to the cell in which The Copperhead is imprisoned, and finds only a mild-mannered businessman in there instead. The villain angrily ponders how the masked crusader could have possibly eluded his clutches, and then lets the obviously innocent businessman out of his cell.
· Hoodwinked! (2005) – In this witty re-imagining of the classic children’s tale, Little Red Riding Hood (voiced by Anne Hathaway) cautiously approaches the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton), who is in bed disguised as her grandmother. In this instance, the disguise is a dime-store Halloween mask tied to the Wolf’s not-at-all-human-shaped face. Red is extremely suspicious, and the Wolf seems decidedly irritated with the ill-conceived charade. When Red asks why Granny’s mouth doesn’t move when she talks, Wolfie shrugs it off as the result of too many facelifts. When Red says "What big ears you have," he replies, "All the better to hear your many criticisms."
· ‘Allo ‘Allo (1982-1992) – At least once per episode, the master of disguise Roger Leclerc (Jack Haig) would enter Rene’s café and reveal his true identity by lifting his glasses and announcing "It is I… Leclerc!" Sometimes he would peel a fake moustache off to reveal his real moustache. No matter what form his disguises took, he always looked exactly the same. |
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