Victoria Grant (“The Sound of Music’s” Julie Andrews) is a struggling soprano singer in turn-of-the-century Paris. She can barely make ends meet, can’t pay her rent and is hungry for a good, warm meal. In a surprising twist of faith (as in ‘convenient plot gimmick’) Vicky runs into a down-on-his-lock gay entertainer named Carrol ‘Toddy’ Todd (Robert Preston) while she tries to get out paying for an expensive restaurant dinner by dropping a giant cockroach into the salad. I hate roaches with a passion, and seeing one (shot in close-up!) wreck havoc amongst the restaurant patrons made my sides ache from laughing so much. Anyway, Vicky and Toddy become pals and the latter cooks up a scheme to turn the meek soprano singer into a female impersonator that can get better jobs than Vicky could ever hope for.

That’s how the showbiz career Polish Count Victor Grezhinski (AKA Victoria Grant pretending to be a man that pretends to be a woman… uhhh??!!) is born. The act catches the Parisian nightclub world by storm. It’s so successful that even heterosexual tough men like King Marchand (“The Rockford Files’” James Garner) fall for the performer’s spell, which threatens to both expose Vicky & Tobby’s lies about Count Victor as well as undermine Marchand’s reputation as a tough man in the American underworld. Anyone care to bet that this dilemma can only be solved by one final, glorious, well put-together musical numbers in which all the characters find happiness and fulfillment without suffering the consequences of their deceptions?

The third and last film that Blake Edwards directed starring his wife Julie Andrews (“10” and “SOB” being the other two), 1982’s “Victor/Victoria” is an old-fashioned romantic comedy mixed with a Broadway musical (which the movie eventually became for a brief time in the 1990’s) and a few sprinkles from Edwards’ school of “Pink Panther” pratfalls. It’s a movie 20 years past its era, the type of moive in which everyone speaks and sings in perfect English even though the movie is supposed to be taking place in France. And yet "V/V" doesn’t feel dated because Edwards injects in it the warmth and humanity that he also brought to his now-classic “Days of Wines and Roses” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” romantic comedies. Despite treating the homosexuality of Preston’s Tobby character with the same sugar-coated view that Mike Nichols’ brought to the American remake of “The Birdcage” ("V/V’s" PG rating would probably be a PG-13 today) Tobby and all the characters are given ample room to grow, react and/or be just plain outrageous. Lesley Ann Warren’s Norma Cassidy dancer, in particular, takes it to the extreme in her few, memorable scenes together. It's as if she has stepped out of the set of "Grease"!

Preston’s mannerisms and outrageous wardrobe, along with his final performance at the end of the flick (a punctuation mark to two plus hours of fun), make him the standout performer of “V/V,” IMHO. “Webster’s” Alex Karras scores the movie’s biggest laughs though, one in which the expression in James Garner’s King Marchand character is simply priceless (see picture on the right). Speaking of Garner, his is the most difficult performance in “V/V” because he’s supposedly a ruthless American businessman to the underworld that melts at the presence of someone that he thinks is a man. Some subtle jabs at how someone’s attraction to another person is repressed because of society’s morality rules about homosexuality (a topic that isn’t too far removed from today’s headlines or the upcoming 2004 Election) are effectively mined for both drama and laughs.

Julie Andrews, a Broadway veteran herself, is photpgraphed by her husband/director in such glowing lights that it’s a good thing the woman has the acting chops to keep the Vicky/Count Victor personalities from overwhelming one another (or the viewers). Even if you don’t care about the plot or the homosexual aspect of “V/V” though, any movie in which musical maestro Henry Mancini earns an Academy Award for the score has got to have musical numbers and tunes worth the price of admission. And guess what? “V/V” delivers on all counts. It’s even got moments of inspired, Clouseau-patented madness via some elaborate physical gags to keep the movie’s 133 minutes moving briskly and enjoyably. It’s a shame Edwards lost his way after this one throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, never recapturing the magic touch that blessed his work for most of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Oh well!