VICTOR/VICTORIA
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralph Benner
Julie Andrews has been maligned for so long that even when she wanted desperately to change her prissy English tomboy image--as she tried to do in S.O.B.--she still got a royal spanking from the critics. When she bared that ample set of boobs, there was more blase in the reactions than pleasure. If any other movie saint had done this, she'd have been the next month's spread in PLAYBOY. But Andrews elicits venom that is, I think, more telling of the temperaments of some critics; she's an easy target because she defies their case of the hates through her indomitable spirit. In defiance to what the vultures tried to do to her after STAR! and DARLING LILI, two of the most costly failures in movie musical history, and in spite of a background that includes a poor education and being a child breadwinner and caretaker to a mother and alcoholic stepfather, and in spite of being tested by two daughters drenched in narcissism and drugs, she remains, if always reserved, a rather naughty, spicy, fun-loving woman. (Something Dick Cavett knows how to bring out.) I fell in love with her in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, in which she co-starred with James Garner. Got to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the 60s, a low-scale, sassy anti-war-bittersweet love story, the precursor of sorts to the late Paddy Chayefsky's other irreverent screenplays, THE HOSPITAL and NETWORK. I doubt if Andrews (or Garner) has ever been better. Her Englishwoman's shell had cracks in it, some secrets were oozing out. And confirmed by Andrews to Mike Wallace on a recent 60 MINUTES, on which she admitted that she had a "wonderful time" doing loves scenes with Garner. (When those shots were finished, she said, "My knees buckled.") In LOOK magazine back in 1966, famed photographer of women Douglas Kirkland confirmed her polished dishiness with a color blow-up showing tantalizing cleavage; as Alfie might say, she's one sexy bird.
It's the imagemakers in Hollywood who filled in the cracks with sugar and the weight of their dubious achievements is painfully obvious in STAR! and THE TORN CURTAIN and DARLING LILI and THE TARARMIND SEED. They took what was a winning formula in EMILY, MARY POPPINS, parts of HAWAII and THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE and most of all THE SOUND OF MUSIC and made it upchucky. Though packed with Civil Defense supplies of sweets, THE SOUND OF MUSIC created so powerful a false image for Andrews that she got trapped; no movie role of hers caught the public's attention more, and, according to the Hollywood money men, the audience wouldn't accept her any other way. But it's more than that: no musical, with the exception of WESTSIDE STORY (or possibly AN AMERICAN IN PARIS) has been subjected to more hindsighted scorn. And she became, very unwillingly, a dual symbol: one of unasked for saintliness as well as phoniness. But nothing I've ever read or heard about THE SOUND OF MUSIC throughout the years accounts for why it became such a surprise hit. The fact is, 20th Century Fox didn't expect much from it, recognizing the dangers of possible saccharin-induced coma, and risked it as a roadshow presentation in an effort to recoup costs. Its success is decried as an example of how indiscriminate movie tastes often are. True as that may be, there's something deeper about how American audiences initially responded: our involvement in Vietnam was heating up and, speaking from the personal experience of having entered the Army at the time, many of us were terrified that we'd be shipped out alive but brought back in a box. THE SOUND OF MUSIC was three-hour comfort therapy; except the blockheads and their kids, most of us knew how utterly phony it was--perhaps the most manipulative musical ever made?--but we clung to the rot of its supercalifragilistic family values because much around us was crumbling. The imagery of goodness got to us; despite everything that shouted otherwise, we wanted to believe in what we knew wasn't. (Even when, in repeated viewings, we mocked it by singing along with Maria and the brats.) And we were only a short time away from battling about the morality of that phony righteousness in the Chicago summer of 1968.
Stripping the layers of goo hasn't been easy for Andrews, having tried like hell in HAWAII and STAR! It's clear she's a finite actress, and having been too well taught theatrical elocution she developed so irritating a manner of speech that it's almost deigned, as false as title in royalty. It had, and still has, a galloping horseshoe effect--it charges out and ricochets back. This irritation didn't hurt much in HAWAII, in that Max Von Sydow was so dominating, so compulsively watchable. It was laughable in THE TORN CURTAIN, though Andrews, and Paul Newman, can't be faulted: According to Andrews in Donald Spoto's THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS, "The first day of production, Hitchcock announced that for him the fun was over--the creative part was finished with the script and storyboard preparation--and now, he said, the rest was a bore." Andrews' persona was ruinous for STAR!: all those years of vocal outreach from the stage to audiences in theatres destroyed any chance of variety in vocalizing Gertrude Lawrence as the clever, conniving harridan the theatrical crowd considered her to be. Unlike those who deemed Andrews's task impossible, I think she could have played Lawrence had not Robert Wise's shallow vision and overload of songs weighed her down. This expensive movie has the shockingly bogus, stifling look of 60s television, and every number is performed without any consideration of what Lawrence's peculiar attractions were; still seeing only Maria, Wise uses Andrews to obliterate Lawrence. There's a very discernible current of anxiety running throughout "Star!": the charge could be that Wise is exposing his lowest estimate of Lawrence as talet and person; I think the stronger charge is that, though he gets facts fairly right, he doesn't appreciate who and what kind of talent he's biographing. When Andrews gets angry in STAR! or swears in 10, she's not real, she's Maria Poppins at Drury Lane. Her boobs in S.O.B. were indeed spectacular, and when she complimented William Holden on his unadorned handsomeness, the line was wrought with such feeling that she might have, in reality, been flirting. The movie itself was too drenched in vindictiveness to connect with the audience--a slam against the way the studio that released DARLING LILI interfered with the final edit, though one look at Rock Hudson should have told director Blake Edwards that the movie hadn't a prayer.
In VICTOR/VICTORIA, Andrews works diligently, with more ease and self-enjoyment and assurance than she ever has, and while she's imperfect, she hasn't been this likable since THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY. Out on her a double s and hungry during 30s Paris, she meets with an old queen--Robert Preston--who has this ingenious idea of turning her into a man who pretends to be a woman. Opening her act in a swanky night club, dressed in a black gown with stringy bat-wing sleeves and a rhinestone headdress, like Elizabeth Taylor's in THE BLUE BIRD and Lena Horne's in THE WIZ, and with Liz eye shadow, Andrews as Victor as Victoria belts out "Le Jazz Hot" and becomes an instant smash. In the audience is smoothie James Garner, who's rather unnerved by and suspicious of his attraction to Victoria who's "really" Victor, but his dumb-dumb bodyguard Alex Karras isn't. He applauds, "She's a winner!" Happy to confirm Andrews is. Andrews' voice is a tad more full-throaty this time out--her singing isn't piercingly antiseptic--though she's not in any way taxed by the pedestrian score of Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse. There's evidence of a movie novice's anxiety in her Emily, though it helped her performance enormously. (It provided a balance to Garner's effortless sleaze.) Here as Victor/Victoria, Andrews's own sense of relaxation is another first: she really loves doing the part, and the audience loves watching her do it.
(It is at the completion of "Jazz Hot," when Victoria whips off her headdress to reveal she's Victor, that the physical charade must start strong and proceed to be stronger; instead, weaknesses start revealing themselves. Greeting the audience as Victor after the triumph, Andrews' make up and hairdo are too unconvincing to make valid their intent; she looks even more like a woman than the Polish Count she's pretending to be. With the movies' advances in latex cosmetics, she could have been startlingly boy-man like-in fact, needed to be. Amid all the sophisticated fake sets, she looks the fakiest. In the recent PBS special JULIE ANDREWS: BACK ON BROADWAY, a 90 minute career retrospective and often a blatent commercial for the Broadway version of V/V, we see that the makeup artists--and Julie's aging--have made her Victor physically more convincing.)
During the beginning of the movie, Robert Preston, finishing a trifle of a song at a posh gay club, responds to the chilly reception he gets by saying to the snobby audience, "Thank you, you're most kind--in fact, you're every kind." It's a tired old bitch put-down, but as dropped by Preston it gets renewed punch and a lot of laughs. He has the role down pat: his Liberace-like hair, the slightest swish in the seat, the way he holds his arms to his body with just the lightest limpy-wrists touch--why, he's every woman's best friend, every gay's auntie. Clearly the best performance in the movie, it's probably more than acting--it's love play. In the most recent years preceeding his death, Preston had become a close American equivalent to the grace and relaxation of John Gielgud, both becoming masterful, endearing finessieurs. A tribute to Jean Harlow, Lesley Ann Warren as the brassy, nasal, shocking pink moll hanging on to Garner may appear to be getting the worst of cliche parts--when she sings "Chicago, Illinois," she could be setting heterosexual sexiness back a few decades--but she's abundantly charming.
VICTOR/VICTORIA is director Blake Edwards' most cordial and sustained picture, even if it is a SOME LIKE IT HOT-CABARET rip-off, and yet another remake of the German VIKTOR UND VIKTORIA. Filmed entirely at London's Pinewood Studios, it's a scrumptiously stylish, chromy, very easy-going musical comedy. In the 80s era of Reagan consumption and intolerance, the prankster movie maker of those Clouseau farces became a softy movie essayist.
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