One question: do you believe that a woman could pretend to be a man who’s pretending to be a woman? Let me back up. I’ll put it this way to make it a little clearer what I mean. Do you believe, or even want to believe if you will, that a brilliant actress like Julie Andrews, best known for her angelic role of Sister Maria in Sound of Music, could play a female impersonator in the heyday of Gay Paree around, oh, 1933? Yes, that’s the year. It’s when the silent German film, Viktor und Viktoria, came to the screen. Fifty years later, Blake Edwards remakes the film as Victor/Victoria starring his real-life wife.

Yet maybe the question is hyperfluous (or do I mean superfluous?), pure and simple air, meaning absolutely nothing to you who has never set eyes on a female impersonator in your upright, sainted existence. That’s okay. I haven’t, either! But I have had the pleasure of viewing The Bird Cage with Robin Williams whose homosexual partner (played by Nathan Lane) headlined as drag queen at his gay nightclub. Maybe you’ve seen this wonderful comedy, too? Now could a woman have played the drag queen’s part?

I wouldn’t have believed it until being treated to Julie Andrew’s performance. How believable it was in the silent original version remains to be seen, but that actor didn’t have to sound slightly masculine, either. Andrews did. Sporting a man’s haircut and creased (and cropped?) pants, she deepened her voice while talking and singing and still hit some pretty high notes in her acts. It fooled everybody in Gay Paree, whether they were gay, lesbian or straight…except for a gangster who fell in love with her!

From the beginning, please...

Well, this is a rags to riches story, you could say, that Disney did not create. We know Andrews is something special when we hear her audition for a singing position, but she wasn’t what the club owner wanted. She’s out on the snowy, cluttered streets of 1930's Paree again, fainting at the vision of a fat man gorging on a cream-filled donut inside a window.

When she comes to, she hobbles back to her dingy flat and is cornered by her creepy landlord demanding rent. Suddenly, morals be damned, she offers herself to him for a meatball. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing until, thrown across his bed, she spies a monstrous cockroach and shrieks. With the presence of mind to capture the critter in her handbag, she trounces off without a place for her poor head and unleashes the evil dude, after snarfing down platters of fish and chicken, into her salad and thereafter the entire horrified restaurant while making her getaway with a friend.

This friend had heard her at the audition and when her cheap, wet clothes shrank after being furnace-dried, he loans her his former lover’s clothes. They are a man’s clothes; he is gay. Soon the idea is hatched and she becomes the toast of Paree, Victor, singing sensation at a popular nightclub. No more problems, right? She’s making thousands of dollars. Then the debonair gangster, played smoothly by James Garner of Rockford Files fame, seeks her out and she goes queasy in the legs.

Now she has a problem. What’s a woman to do when her livelihood and newfound independence depends on her staying a man, but she wants desperately to be herself and fall into a heterosexual man’s arms? After being miserable for a while, she decides to try both. They are found out, though, and the gangster gains the notoriety of being gay. His life is now in danger, dear reader. When they say love conquers all, does it really? You’ll have to rent the movie to find out!

Be honest now, Jan...

Okay, I admit it. I loved it! From the sad woe-is-me beginning to the living la vida loca to the hilarious laugh-with-me ending, the movie kept me pleasantly entertained for the entire time. It’s true it helps that I enjoy hot, syncopated jazz and sultry songsters like Andrews here. There were many flashy shows like you’ll see in Vegas with dancing men in tuxedoes surrounding “Victor” and all very drag royal.

The story was also very engaging and gave me something to think about. Once Andrews was wondering how to act masculine when her gay friend announced that there were no differences between men and women and there are all kinds if you look for them. She quipped that men always pee* standing up; he shook his head. But they have Adam’s Apples, she retorted; he countered by saying he’d met a woman with a huge one. She was focusing on physical differences, but maybe her friend would have been silenced if asked about right and left brain differences, hehe.

I also found it incredibly romantic that the man Victoria fell in love with, the gangster, was the only one who questioned that she was a man. Their cat and mouse game and then his embarrassment in being de-masculinized was quite fascinating.

You know, I’m not part of the gay scene, but it seemed pretty authentic to me. I thought all the acting was top-knotch and polished like a gem, making me laugh, frown, squirm and drop my jaw. The best compliment I could pay Blake Edwards is that I could see his wondrously visual movie actually happening in 1930’s Gay Paree. I don’t know, but this might be more of a love story with unusual complications than it is simply a rags to riches story. As I mentioned above, you’ll just have to risk discovery of your “syncopated” dark side and go rent it.

* Urination reference used on permission from Hard_to_Please.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie