The Unabashedly Queer Musical That Turned the Genre on Its Head

Edwards based his film on Reinhold Schünzel’s 1933 German comedy Victor and Victoria, which combines mannered humor with Busby Berkeley–inspired stage numbers. Though the film retains hints of the source material’s Weimar-era Berlin permissiveness, Victor/Victoria is as much about the contemporary times in which it was made, drawing parallels between pre–World War II European sexual experimentation and the short-lived aspirational cosmopolitanism of the early 1980s. Between 1981 and 1982, there had been a proliferation of American films that challenged the hetero- and gender-normative status quo, which in addition to Edwards’s film included Making Love; Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Personal Best; Deathrap; Tootsie; Only When I Laugh; and The World According to Garp. This isn’t a retrospective revelation. In the autumn 1982 issue of Film Quarterly, film scholar Ed Sikov wrote, “1982 is, as everyone knows, the year in which Hollywood ‘handled’ the gay question.” Even the country’s most popular critics, Siskel and Ebert, devoted an entire 1982 episode of their syndicated TV series to the topic, titled “Changing Attitudes Toward Homosexuality.” In this lovably progressive conversation between the two hetero tastemakers, Siskel forcefully states, “The treatment of homosexual characters has been pathetic in Hollywood,” and even namechecks Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet thirteen years before it was adapted into a more widely known documentary.

Victor/Victoria is no mere trend piece, however, even if its main character is destined to be a flash in the pan. It’s a joyous, exuberant comedy whose sparkle remains undimmed because it uses its slapstick premise to launch a surprisingly sophisticated inquiry into gender roles. Edwards’s film is not overly concerned with whether Victoria will be found out and exposed as a fraud; it’s more focused on a series of escalating, amorous complications that reveal the inadequacy of mainstream society’s definitions of love and desire. Following Victoria’s breakout first performance, the glitter-bedazzled “Le Jazz Hot” (a metatextual song about musical appropriation, in this case the Parisian fascination with New Orleans jazz), she is tentatively romanced by the mob-adjacent Chicago nightclub impresario King Marchand (James Garner). He’s been so beguiled by her act that he refuses to believe she’s not a woman; his inability to accept that he might have fallen in love with a man leads the tuxedoed, hair-slicked Victor to respond that he’s “preoccupied with stereotypes” and that he should just accept that “you’re one kind of man, I’m another . . . one that doesn’t have to prove it—to myself or anyone.” Meanwhile, King’s girlfriend, Norma, a Jean Harlow–esque bottle blonde, raging over his newfound crush, embodies an entirely different type of extreme gender conformity, hilariously played in a beautifully grotesque caricature of femininity by Lesley Ann Warren. Protecting King from Norma’s increasingly violent jealousy, as well as from his own desperation to reveal Victor’s “truth,” football player turned bodyguard “Squash” Bernstein (played by football player turned actor Alex Karras) adds the final element in the dizzying romantic roundelay and provides the film’s most surprising subversion of traditional masculinity.

Having grown up watching Victor/Victoria, I have been delighted—and not altogether unsurprised—to discover how well the film has aged as the culture has evolved, while scads of sex-preoccupied comedies of its era reek of closed-minded reactionary politics. In its own light way (for the film is surely a work of mainstream entertainment), Victor/Victoria has a radical spirit, and little interest in mining marginalized people for its considerable laughs. The wisecracks are almost always about the presumptions of heterosexist patriarchy; King’s obsession with masculinity is seen as patently absurd, as he intentionally gets into fistfights and puts himself in the path of danger to prove his manhood. Meanwhile, the film’s queer characters are never the butt of the joke. Edwards’s trademark widescreen slapstick—honed over years of following Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau through exquisitely composed backgrounds and foregrounds in the Pink Panther films—is here deployed in deep-focus frames in which people hide under beds, emerge from closets, and try to creep undetected through hotel hallways, allowing the director to indulge in his bread and butter while constantly underlining his film’s themes of furtive sexuality.

Presiding confidently over all this mishigas is Toddy, who refuses to be kept in the shadows. In a role originally tailored for Sellers before he died in 1980 at age fifty-four, Preston plays Toddy with a consistent balance of pugnacity and sweetness. The poignant center of the film, his friendship with Victoria is one of American cinema’s most winsome depictions of the bone-deep bond between women and gay men; the only truly mutually supportive relationship in the film, it’s the real love story here. “How long have you been a homosexual?” she asks. “How long have you been a soprano?” he retorts, while the two soak their feet in a warm bath following a thunderstorm. Later, the two will perform at Chez Lui the laidback soft-shoe “You and Me,” a song about unbreakable friendship, and you’ve never seen a pair more relaxed in front of an audience. “I taught him everything he knows,” Toddy boasts. Victor banters back: “That’s why he has so little left.” Toddy and Victoria’s scam is never depicted as anything other than the daring gambit of two down-on-their-luck creatives. At one point, Toddy schools Victoria on how to transform into Victor—to be both more masculine and more flamboyant—and his lessons come across as the affectionate goofing of two buddies in complete sympatico. Walk like a man—but not that kind of man. As the critic Caden Mark Gardner observes, the scene is like “Pygmalion meets Tea and Sympathy.”

Much like Andrews, Preston was a musical-theater icon with an established, unblemished persona. He was known best for inhabiting on both stage and screen another lovable scam artist: Harold Hill in The Music Man, a thick slice of American cheese that Toddy’s cosmopolitan, nonconformist spirit couldn’t be further from. In one scene, Norma, swept away by Toddy’s debonair charm and feathered hair but disappointed by his avowed gayness, shakes her head and says, “I think it’s a terrible waste!”

Toddy’s response is shameless: “If it’s any consolation, I assure you it is not wasted.”