OPEN POST: With Victor, Victoria, Toddy, King And Norma!

It's over thirty years old - can you believe? - but "Victor/Victoria," the classic musical farce by writer/director Blake Edwards, loosely based on a German comedy from the 1930s, may still be the most radical Hollywood movie to prominently feature gay characters. It's even more daring and more progressive, I'd argue, than the likes of "Brokeback Mountain" or "Call Me By Your Name." And it does it all with, as they say, a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. Some stunt!

Consider the feat, a movie in which Julie Andrews, a straight woman pretending to be a gay man pretending to be a woman, attracts James Garner, a straight tough-guy who's flummoxed, then approving, when Alex Karass, his tough-guy cohort, comes out of the closet and becomes lovers with Robert Preston, a gay cabaret performer who is himself pretending to be Andrews' gay lover. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in scenario wherein not a single gay character is "tortured" or the butt of any joke - the phobic and fearful are the comic targets here - but instead blithely accepted. In an especially bright dialogue exchange, Lesley Ann Warren, as Norma, Garner's ditzy gun moll, tries to flirt with Toddy, played by Preston, only to stunned to learn that he's gay: 

Norma: But you're so attractive!

[Toddy chuckles]
Norma: Well, I just think it's a terrible waste.
[Toddy laughs heartily]
Toddy: If it's any consolation, I assure you it is not wasted.
Norma: You know, I think that the right woman could reform you.
Toddy: You know, I think that the right woman could reform you, too.
Norma: Me? Give up men? Forget it!
Toddy: You took the words right out of my mouth.

What's noteworthy about this isn't the dialogue's humor - though it is funny - but it's casualness, or the manner in which Warren accepts Preston's rebuff based on his sexuality without batting an eyelash or passing judgement. In the world of "Victor/Victoria," everyone's free to be themselves no matter the confusion, and, yes, it's a fantasy, but also an unblinking one. When Garner first zeros in on Andrews, dressed out of drag as the male "Victor," their exchange walks a teasing tightrope that few mass-market movies do: 

King: I just find it hard to believe that you're a man.
Victoria: Because you found me attractive as a woman?
King: Yes, as a matter of fact.
Victoria: That happens frequently.
King: Not to me.
Victoria: Just proves the old adage: "There's a first time for everything."
King: I don't think so.
Victoria: But you're not a hundred per cent sure?

[He pauses]
King: Practically.

[She leans in, whispers teasingly]
Victoria: Ah, but to a man like you, someone who believes he could never, ever, under any circumstances find another man attractive, the margin between "practically" and "for sure" must be as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Significantly, when Toddy first shows Victoria how to "be a man," the scene swiftly bats back at typically cliched sequences which purport to show how difficult it is for gay men to behave like straight men without mincing and being a sissy - a particularly galling comic routine given how gay men have successfully schooled themselves to pass as straight for a millennia. But with Toddy and Victoria, it's all turned on its head with Toddy's instructions: "Now, when you're dancing, remember, make it broooooader, with tons of shoulder. Remember, you're a draaaaaaaag queen!" Here, mincing is embraced as a means of fooling a straight audience predisposed to the cliche, and the sissy is reclaimed as a source of power. 

The movie was certainly more forward-thinking and subversive than other gay or cross-dressing movies of its period, including 1982's "Making Love," which treats gayness as an inscrutable "mystery" and a "problem" to be solved by its perplexed female lead; and "Tootsie," which, for all it of its justly celebrated wit and stellar performances, is a supposedly feminist comedy wherein the only main female character, played by Jessica Lange, is a weak, cuddle-bunny alcoholic who needs a man. 

Better still, the director, Blake Edwards, an old-guard Hollywood master, beat the new-guard at their filmmaking game. Just one year previous, Francis Ford Coppola had proclaimed that his movie "One From The Heart" would "revolutionize" the combo of stage craft and film craft in the movies. The results were strained, to put it mildly. Then along came "Victor/Victoria," giggling and prat-falling - and filmed entirely on elaborate indoor/outdoor sets which look like the Broadway of dreams. Equally stunning was Edwards' refusal to fall for passing trends - at the time, it was MTV-style whiplash-fast cutting and shaky-cam - instead going for elegant long takes that "cut," so to speak, by way of movement within the frame, and also with lighting cues which sometimes illuminated and dimmed within the same shot to subtly indicate the three identities of Andrews - as Victor, Victor in drag and Victoria. Moreover, not for nothing was the aging Edwards schooled by silent movie directors. Every sight-gag is smashingly effective. 

If "Victor/Victoria" is the "fun masterpiece" of the 1980s, it's also sounds fantastic. If you need a refresher, listen to Andrews sing "Le Jazz Hot," and Warren, who should have won an Oscar for her comic performance, sing "Chicago, Illinois" (and marvel anew at her gun-moll accent when she sings, "Trendy travelers tend to tawk..."). It might be over 30 years old, but "Victor/Victoria" is as fresh as ever. 

Photo Credits: Amazon/MGM/Peerford Ltd.