The Problematics: Are the Progressive Bonafides of 1982’s ‘Victor/Victoria’ Still Valid?

You can’t please everyone. We’ve always known that, but the Internet just makes the fact plainer, and its manifestations more visible and potentially irritating. Doing my usual due diligence while researching this piece, I found a comment following a 2010 obituary for Blake Edwards in the Fort Worth Weekly. Said obituary gave Edwards credit for a “matter-of-fact treatment of gayness” in the 1982 farce Victor/Victoria, and commenter Roy responded “Edwards never did get gay humor right, though he kept trying and failing. From the character Irving in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the execrable Victor, Victoria, he was like most straight directors when dealing with the subject. No gay person can watch Victor/Victoria without cringing. It is patronizing. In general, his comedy was overbroad.” Roy did not add “I’m glad he’s dead,” which one can take as a mercy.

Just to get it out of the way, here’s the lowdown on Irving, a character you may or may not recall in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (a film which, as we all know by now, is a Problematic par excellence). This is barely a character, and certainly not a gay character either; rather, they are a blonde woman who tells Martin Balsam in a party scene that she calls herself “Irving.” They later end up necking in Holly Golightly’s shower. Not while it’s on, mind you.

For those who don’t remember the times when bringing a gay or gay-coded character on screen in a Hollywood picture couldn’t be done without at least an accompanying whiff of disapproval or condescension, the way Edwards (who was also behind the incredibly popular Pink Panther comedies starring Peter Sellers) was gay-friendly hardly seems earth shaking. In his now-notorious pursuit-of-Bo-Derek comedy Ten, he gave Dudley Moore’s lead character a gay best friend without making a big deal, or any kind of deal of it. In SOB, his still-unique middle-finger to Hollywood hypocrisy (best known for the scene in which family-friendly Julie Andrews, Edwards’ longtime collaborator and wife, goes topless — it’s very meta), Robert Preston plays a gay physician beloved by all his Tinseltown cronies, and not just because of his liberal distribution of Vitamin B-12 shots.

In Victor/Victoria, which followed SOB, which was released forty years ago this month, consummate showperson Preston played gay again, as Carroll “Toddy” Todd, a Paris entertainer in 1934. Toddy’s gayness is bluntly signaled in the movie’s opening, showing him in bed with a (younger) man, a gigolo of sorts (played by Malcolm Jamieson). Toddy is an arguable cliché, the older gay man with an unfulfilled love life. But Preston refuses to play him according to any kind of stereotype; his utterly comfortable work is one of the film’s best features. Toddy’s introduction to Andrews’ impoverished singer Victoria is a bit of an extended, Chaplinesque meet-cute, the two characters very down on their luck and trying to get a meal. The process of which creates havoc. (The movie is replete with set-destroying scenes and musical numbers.) Developments at Toddy’s flat, in which the aforementioned gigolo gets a bit of a comeuppance at the end of Victoria’s fist, provide Toddy with get-rich-quick inspiration. He’ll dress Victoria as a man, create a fake male identity for her, and package her as a female impersonator.

“A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?” Victoria asks. “Ridiculous,” Toddy agrees. “Preposterous,” she adds. “In fact it’s so preposterous no one would ever believe it.” Toddy concludes.

This sets into play a gender-confused comedy of manners that was considered pretty groundbreaking in 1982 and seems a lot less so today. The truly progressive side of the film was in its gay-friendliness, not its exploration of gender roles. In point of fact it resolves with a pretty insistent reestablishment of traditional gender roles for its characters.

But Edwards shouldn’t be faulted for not creating a revolutionary statement because he wasn’t setting out to do any such thing. The movie is based on a 1933 German farce called Viktor und Victoria, one of the last gasps of Weimar Republic cultural permissiveness but nothing you’d call daring in 1982. The German picture was remade in England, as a vehicle for the wholesome-in-a-not-unlike-Andrews-way star Jessie Matthews, under the title First a Girl.

For much of the section in which Toddy and Victoria craft her new persona, the theme isn’t gender identity but role playing. Toddy instructs Victoria in how to “act” like a man as opposed to a woman, while also laying out the areas in which there’s some pertinent ambiguity about the difference. Once Victoria gets her makeover, she comes off a little, appearance-wise at least, like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. But a lot more lively in demeanor anyway. Or else how could she captivate James Garner’s Chicago nightclub mogul King Marchand?

Beguiled by Andrews during her performance, Garner is instantly besotted and gets verklempt at the final reveal, in which “Victoria” removes her tiara to reveal “Victor.” King, along with his busty showgirl mistress Norma and bodyguard Squash, visit “Victor” after the show. Giggly Norma (Lesley Ann Warren) gigglingly tells Victor, “He doesn’t think you’re a man.” On introduction, King elaborates: “I just find it hard to believe that you’re a man.”

“Because you found me attractive as a woman?” Victoria counters

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

Here’s where the movie enters its most interesting grappling with actual themes of identity and orientation. King frets over the idea that “Victor” is a man to the extent that he becomes impotent even after Norma puts her most hotsy-totsy moves on him. (While Warren shows real comedic chops here, the movie arguably oversells the abrasiveness of her character.)

In subsequent exchanges between King and “Victor,” the movie flirts with leading to a conclusion that when it comes to gender and attraction, you’re just best off to free your mind and shuck off old concepts. “You’re one kind of man and I’m another.” Victor/Victoria observes to King.

But the movie dares not linger long in these fields. After King peeps at “Victor” having a bath, he is reassured in having seen the secondary sexual characteristics (not to mention the primary one) that peg Victor as a biological female. So heterosexual order is restored well before King plants his first kiss on Victoria. The gay theme is transferred: turns out that King’s friend and bodyguard Squash, played by onetime professional football player Alex Karras, is the one who is attracted to actual men. (“Listen boss, if a guy like you has got the guts to admit he’s gay, so can I,” Squash tells King after walking in on his boss and Victoria in bed, having not yet gotten the memo.)

And the movie immediately becomes a lot less interesting. King starts playing the patriarch. The couple “date:” he takes her to a boxing match, she takes him to see Madame Butterfly. The f-word (the gay slur, not the bomb) is used, twice. (And we had been doing so well!) A punchline of sorts comes when Norma screams at King, “You two-timing son of a bitch! He’s a woman.”  Which isn’t exactly “nobody’s perfect.”

Nevertheless: putting aside for the moment its ultimately very square conclusions, the very fact that Blake Edwards could get a star like James Garner to play a guy questioning his own heterosexuality represented some kind of triumph for progressivism in early ’80s Hollywood. Trust me.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.