On Screen

...In Victor/Victoria, set in Paris in the '30s, Julie Andrews plays the title character, a woman pretending to be a man impersonating a woman...

...Once the story is set in motion, most of the unabashedly absurd complications unwind in delightful fashion...

...There are some unexpected developments—like the one involving King's hulking bodyguard, Squash (Alex Kar-ras)—that are just as droll, as well as some rather more predictable moments involving an aging homosexual named Toddy (Robert Preston) that are less so...

...To be sure, Kin-ski is amazing to behold, clothed or naked...

...Several of the glimpses we get are amusing...

...Subsequently, in a trice touch, it turns out that despite Shrevie's obsession with popular music ("When I listen to my records, they take me back to certain periods in my life"), he is an awkward dancer...

...Other well-done vignettes are equally revealing in small ways of typically male behavior...

...In the end, Diner is merely one more variation on the theme of the American male's inability to grow up...

...Or consider how Eddie (Steve Gutten-berg) gets dressed in the morning: As if it were a sweatshirt, he pulls a wrinkled, buttoned up white dress shirt over his head, then slips on a necktie that has been left knotted from the night before—or possibly from the first time it was tied...

...This farce, the fourth or fifth version of what began in 1933 as Viktor und Vik-toria, bears a family resemblance to Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, where Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in drag, joined an all-female dance band in order to escape pursuing gangsters during the Prohibition era...

...Especially surprising, therefore, is Pauline Kael's criticism of Victor/Victoria for being "degrading," "coarse" and "contemptuous" of women...

...Unfortunately, too many of the characters' adventures are transparent movie "bits...

...Otherwise it's likely to seem both enormously silly and boring, as it did to me...

...Incidentally, I was baffled by our never getting a look at Elise's face, even at the wedding closing the film...

...But Levinson seems to take this for granted and as a result he fails to provide an interesting perspective on it...

...And to hear...

...The debt-ridden Boogie is rescued at the last minute by a friend of his mother's, who pays off what he owes and offers him a job...

...The film is set in 1959 and reportedly draws heavily on the experiences of its writer/director, Barry Levinson...

...Had we been given some sense of where the characters are going, the film would have been more satisfying...

...it simply means that the plot's mainspring is a little less tightly wound...

...she's a starving out-of-work opera singer who capitalizes on the fact that female impersonators can land jobs in cabarets more easily than genuine females can...

...most are well-acted...

...Fenwick seems destined to keep sliding downhill, but his story line gets lost in the second half of the film, so we don't have to worry about him...

...More satisfying is Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria, an airy, enjoyable concoction perfect for after-dinner consumption when a full stomach keeps the mind from too much concentration...

...they are not sufficiently entertaining or mirth-provoking to justify the time devoted to them...

...A "pure" movie about homosexuals and female impersonators...

...The main drawback of the film, however, is not that the episodes don't work (since more succeed than fail), or that many of the situations are either cliched or saccharine...

...Billy continues to have difficulties with his girlfriend, Barbara (Kathryn Dowling), too...

...since she is German, her nearly colloquial English is astonishing...

...almost all are badly staged and photographed (the film might as well have been shot in black-and-white, so poor is Levinson's visual sense...

...The 1942 original, in which the horror was subtle and psychological rather than graphic, was more to my taste...

...Unlike American Graffiti, which achieved some sense of dramatic urgency and coherence by focusing on the last night of the summer vacation following high school graduation, and unlike Mean Streets, where the frantic hustling culminated in a violent shootout, Diner is little more than a loose scrapbook...

...The characters in Diner, true to the period, are what today would be called "male chauvinists," yet Kael thinks they're "innocent," "sweet" and "funny"—including Boogie, who plans to seduce Shrevie's wife to win a bet...

...That he chickens out at the last minute doesn't exactly redeem him...

...It covers a few days and nights in the lives of five young men in their early 20s who hang out at a neighborhood diner in Baltimore...

...And like all of their younger counterparts in Lucas' movie, the post adolescent boys of the Falls Point Diner are preoccupied with—and roubled by—the opposite sex...

...It would be hard to have any feelings at all about such artificial figures...

...As for Schrader (who scripted Taxi Driver and wrote and directed Hardcore, Blue Collar and American Gigolo), this bomb makes me wonder why he was ever regarded as a serious filmmaker...

...NATASHA KINSKI is in no danger of being mistaken for a male in Cat People...

...Barbara is unbelievably liberated for her time (she's working as a television producer, and upon getting pregnant she insists on having an abortion, against Billy's wishes), while Billy is simply unbelievable as a character (besides playing the piano, he's also pretty good with his fists and was the only one of the gang to go to college away from Baltimore...

...That strikes me as a particularly roundabout way to set up a shot of an unclad Kinski bound to the bedposts...

...The other people connected with the film are less engaging: Heard continues to await a role commensurate with his talents, and Malcolm McDowell (as Irena's brother) seems well past his prime although he is still young...

...after she flunks, there are only a few anxious moments until it becomes clear thathewill marry her anyway...

...Just for a laugh the manic, alcoholic Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) fakes a car crash in the most improbable way, for example, complete with ketchup for blood...

...Victor/Victoria falls in love with a shady Chicago businessman named King (James Garner), who can't believe that he is likewise attracted to him (her, that is)—a fact that causes King some consternation until he discovers "Victor's" true sex...

...There is a scene in a strip joint that peaks when Billy (Timothy Daly), exhibiting talents hitherto well concealed, climbs on stage and livens up the act with piano playing that unbelievably combines Vladimir Horowitz and Jerry Lee Lewis...

...Her motivation is also a matter of survival...

...The action slackens in a few places, too, most notably during the musical numbers...

...Yet Levinson's lack of a happy ending for this pair is understandable...

...It isn't the food that keeps Billy, Eddie, Shrevie, Fenwick, and Boogie coming back to the Falls Point Diner, and it isn't the plot logic—it is their immaturity...

...Not everything works out rosily...

...Instead, like a Chinese meal, Diner leaves you hungry...

...we see his long-suffering spouse patiently leading him around the floor...

...Certainly, at least in the sense that its intent is to amuse, nothing more or less...

...The deeper flaw is that the pleasant, frankly nostalgic and, for the most part, effectively atmospheric slices-of-life approach never comes close to offering us a whole pie...

...The absence of a vivid threat to the heroine's existence isn't crucial...

...There are no killers stalking her, though...

...The most extraordinary of these comes at the climax, if you will, of the movie...

...Her athletic, boyish body—no waist, slim hips and muscular thighs— is more than offset by a sensuality that never leaves her gender in doubt...

...Eddie threatens not to go through with his forthcoming wedding unless his fiancee, Elise, can pass a quiz on his favorite topic, football...

...If you're into sadomasochism and prefer your thrills to be "mythic" as well as explicit, then this is the movie for you...

...After laboriously establishing that the eponymous creatures turn into animals after having sex with human beings, and only revert to human form after killing them, Ormsby and Schrader have Irena decide that she'd like to remain a feline forever...

...Later, he bawls her out for failing to replace his precious records in their proper slots in the filing system he has carefully worked out...

...Achieving this goal is easy, at least to Ormsby and Schrader's fevered brains: She arranges to have sex with her boyfriend, Oliver (John Heard), while tied to a bed so she can be safely carted of f to the zoo as soon as the post-coital transformation takes place...

...a closer match would be perhaps Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets or George Lucas' American Graffiti...

...Cat People has the gore minus the blessedly minimal plotting of an average "splatter" film...

...This is particularly true of the last sequence, where Preston substitutes disastrously for Andrews in a song-and-dance routine...

...A pointless debate over a late-night meal at the diner is a comic delight: "When you make out, who do you make out to—Mathis or Sinatra...

...Well, of course it is, and therein lies most of the fun...

...Thus she must be captured alive without harming anyone...

...And though Beth considers leaving Shrevie, at the end they are reunited and dancing together...

...In general, Schrader and Ormsby, for all their kinkiness, cannot be accused of taking a direct route to anything in this crazy film...

...Shrevie (Daniel Stern), for instance, sadly confesses to the guys that he can't carry on a five-minute conversation with his wife, Beth (Ellen Bar kin...

...Like Johnny Boy in Scorsese's film, one of Levinson's leads, Boogie (Mickey Rourke), is in hot water because of gambling debts...

...There is even a fantasy girl who intermittently appears riding a horse, evidently the Maryland version of the white T-Bird that carried Suzanne Sommers along California highways in Lucas' first popular excursion into nostalgia...

...I never hear you yell at your friends," she responds...

...Still, for the most part the movie is the kind of "pure entertainment" that Hollywood supposedly isn't turning out any more...

...The few dramatic build-ups in the film are resolved in the most sentimental manner possible...

...The sequence finally ends with the stripper exposing, along with her obvious attributes, her (you guessed it) heart of gold...

...Her physique is an issue here because of the inordinate amount of time it is on display in Cat People, written by Alan Ormsby and directed by Paul Schrader for no other reason, it seems, than to show her off (playing a feline/female named Irena Gallier) as a sex object in a variety of bizarre situations...

...With its episodic structure and male characters taken from life, Diner has already been compared to Federi-co Fellini's/Vitelloni...

...Sound confusing...