Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen GAY PAREE VICTOR/VICTORIA PARIS in 1934 was not a real place. It was like the woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream, somewhere that people went to take leave of their senses. It was, you...
...King gets back to discover through the window that Squash is still across the way, trapped on Victoria's balcony in the snow...
...Like Shakespeare's Julia in Two Gentlemen, Edwards's Julie-i.e., his wife Julie Andrews-here makes her way in the world by donning men's clothes...
...While she continues on her way out of the room, the finger just stays there, crushed in the door, which at last opens a few inches as a low moan is heard...
...Light-headed with hunger, Victoria watches from outside as a fat man in a restaurant eats a cream puff...
...Anything funny that happens is bound to happen again, and again...
...The movie runs two hours, which is long for a comedy...
...One is a Chicago gangster, King Marchand (James Garner), who doesn't believe Victoria is a man...
...Another director would have made more of the detective's agony, and gotten less of a laugh...
...Watching the plot develop behind glass, as Squash and King do every time one of them looks out the window at Victoria's suite, is another frequent gag in this movie, and another example of the economy and underplaying of which Edwards is capable...
...and when she complains that a bourguignon is a little tough, he observes laconically, "The way you're eating, maybe your jaws are getting tired...
...A couple of people come out of that closet, having first snuck into it to spy on Victoria...
...But it's all too complicated and silly to explain, like any comedy of errors...
...Squash now breaks into Victoria's himself to make sure that King doesn't get into any trouble, then Victoria and Toddy come home so that Squash and King both have to sneak out...
...The same incident inspires Blake Edwards to do at least a half dozen more out-of-the-closet gags before the film is over...
...On his last attempt he catches Squash stealing away from...
...and when he opens it to retrieve his suit, she comes out again, fist first...
...Chez Lui, the nightclub where Toddy used to sing, is totally demolished in a fight not once, but twice...
...Having asked, "What is love?'' as Shakespeare does in Twelfth Night, Blake also dismisses the question by answering, " Tis not hereafter,/ Present mirth hath present laughter...
...Despite the fact that it builds up every gag to the point where we think the whole movie is going to fall apart like a house of cards, Victor/Victoria is really a work of great economy...
...Victoria's door in his bathrobe covered with snow...
...King and Victoria begin to have serious talks about where can it all lead...
...When the boyfriend returns, Victoria hides in the armoire...
...That's all...
...Nothing is stretched out one second longer than needed to get the laugh...
...When Squash has to put King's moll Norma (Lesley Ann Warren) on a train home, the tantrum she's having continues soundlessly after she's behind the window of her car...
...But every time he opens the door, he finds either King or Squash lurking in the hall...
...In doing three or four scenes with that detective (Sherloque Tanney), Edwards draws on all he learned from making Inspector Clouzot movies, and the waiter who does double-takes at Victoria is equally well executed...
...This makes the scene all the funnier, but like other inventions of Edwards' s, it distances us from the action as well...
...In the opening shot of Edwards's movie, the camera pans across a night table containing a framed photograph of Marlene Dietrich in drag, and comes to rest on the sleeping face of Toddy (Robert Preston...
...Victoria's ability to hit high C keeps breaking glasses and popping champagne corks throughout the film, and a waiter who served her a meal when she was still a woman gets the same quizzical expression on his face every time he sees her as a man...
...The denouement to all the closet gags comes, for instance, when Victoria unknowingly slams the closet door on the finger of the detective...
...Most of these center on the wardrobe closet in the swanky hotel suite to which Toddy and Victoria move when she's a hit...
...Through all these comings and goings, a man down the hall from Victoria's room has been trying to put his shoes out to be shined...
...Actually, they're Toddy's boyfriend's clothes, which Victoria (Andrews) puts on after spending a night with Toddy because her own clothes, drenched in the rain following a brawl at a restaurant, have shrunk so much that she can no longer get into...
...Where theclassic French waiter is solicitous and attentive, this one is sarcastic and a bit uncouth...
...Again, Edwards has to know just where to stop...
...Is there heat in your room...
...It's full of minor characters who are all running gags themselves...
...He ends his film and solves all its complexities with one swelled foop...
...It was, you should pardon the expression, a fairyland, which is why Blake Edwards chooses to set Victor/Victoria there...
...A world like that in Shakespeare's festive comedies is what Edwards has created here, a topsy-turvy world that, as Theseus puts it, "gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name...
...From King's own suite across the courtyard, his bodyguard, "Squash" Bernstein (Alex Karras), sees him there...
...The other, a detective, is in there because he doesn't believe it either...
...The romantic poverty and Art Deco luxury of Paris in the thirties are so remote, the love life of Victoria so preposterous, that we can't have much feeling for them in the end...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...All at once Henry Mancini's songs, which have until now been hilarious, change mood with a ballad about how "it's acrazy world, full of contradictions...
...But no...
...One of the most elaborately milked routines is when King sneaks into Victoria's suite to spy on her...
...With just a gesture or a word, Edwards establishes a whole personality for this fellow...
...Perhaps one might sooner have expected to hear Twelfth Night or Two Gentlemen of Verona quoted, for they're the plays in which a woman masquerades as a man...
...Awaking to find his boyfriend sneaking a few francs out of his wallet, Toddy consoles himself with a few lines from-what else?-Midsummer Night's Dream: "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,/ And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind...
...Victor/Victoria is just a collection of running gags of this sort...
...And we begin to hope Edwards doesn't ruin everything by letting the farce slip away...
...But Edwards is able to cram so much material into it that it never flags...
...Except that she's no longer there, the reason being, we surmise from the people standing around staring at the sidewalk, that she's fainted in the street...
...The naughty night life of Paris was the only place homosexuals and transvestites were in vogue in those days...
...This incident inspires Toddy with the idea that Victoria could take Paris by storm as a female impersonator, or rather, as an impersonator of a female impersonator, since she already is a female...
...Every double entendre in Edwards's script is just the beginning of a triple entendre, a quadruple entendre, etc...
...asks Squash as if just on his way down to the desk to complain...
...The camera switches to a reverse angle of the man, and back to the window where Victoria is...
...As a brawl erupts in the restaurant where Victoria is eating her bourguignon, the shot cuts to across the street so that we see the whole scene as a kind of silent panorama, a lunatic tableau...
...He unceremoniously bends a fork to straighten it as he plunks it down at Victoria's place...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
