This quasi-musical has made history as a midnight attraction. And it’s easy to see why. It follows young ingenue Eve Harrington (Holly Woodlawn) as she moves to New York and attempts to become an actress. Along the way, she meets a host of very peculiar characters. They include Margo Channing, Mary Poppins, Ninotchka, and Blanche Du Bois, all of whom introduce her to the wild world of NYC.

Eve’s main struggle is finding a roommate. She turns to Mary Poppins, a drag queen accompanied everywhere (and sometimes even carried) by a group of shirtless muscled gay males. Mary uses her sway and power to recommend Eve as a roommate to the crème de la crème of New York society – a pair of lesbian separatist twins named Baby and Jane, a bubbly vegan, as well as a wrestler and his severe European sister. The camp characters peppered throughout the film are an endless source of entertainment. Director Robert J Kaplan creates a new New York, populated with queer icons of classic cinema, themselves transformed into drag queens, lesbians, and trans people. It’s both an interesting reclamation of classic Hollywood as well as a fantastic vision of a world where queerness is the norm.

While the supporting characters are fun, this really is Holly Woodlawn’s movie. There’s something immediately likeable about her, with her soft-spoken voice and her unassuming manner. She’s perfect as the clueless newcomer, but she elevates this generic role with her riotous facial expressions and physical comedy. Her performance has something in common with Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice, but Woodlawn manages to make it all her own. In a particularly hilarious scene, she runs screaming from a lecherous film producer’s apartment after he transforms into a werewolf, only to run straight into a police officer and end up getting arrested herself. Even when she isn’t speaking, she’s utterly captivating. It’s also particularly gratifying to see Woodlawn star in a film that, though a comedy, takes her seriously, when she had previously been limited to Warhol projects like Women in Revolt (Paul Morrissey, 1971), which used her trans identity as a punchline.

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers is a fascinating time capsule of queer art and culture in the early 1970s. It fits right in with John Waters’ filmography and Rocky Horror (Jim Sharman, 1975), which came just a few years later, and paints a picture of a vibrant and growing queer (and specifically trans) scene. This kind of quirky, whimsical weirdness is so endlessly delightful and so sadly missing from most queer films made nowadays. If it ever makes a resurgence as a midnight movie, I can promise I’ll be there every week with a wig and parasol ready to sing along.

Once largely forgotten and long thought lost, Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers made its premiere in Scotland at Weird Weekend after a sole print was found and restored by The Academy Film Archive.