Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Victor/Victoria Blu-ray Movie Review

Is She or Isn't She?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 15, 2016

The late Blake Edwards is best remembered as the writer/director who created The Pink Panther franchise with Peter Sellers, but Edwards' filmography has other major highlights. The Warner Archive Collection is releasing one of Edwards' best, the 1982 cross-dressing comedy, Victor Victoria (sometimes known as Victor/Victoria and hereafter, simply, VV). The film is often characterized as a musical, and indeed Edwards himself retooled it for Broadway in 1996 as a starring vehicle for his wife and frequent creative partner, Julie Andrews. But it's more accurate to call VV a comedy with music. Based on a 1933 German film written and directed by Reinhold Schünzel, VV provides a pretext for a woman to disguise herself as a man and charts the ensuing farce of mistaken identity. The device is at least as old as Shakespeare, but Edwards gives it a distinctively modern spin.

VV is set in Paris in the winter of 1934, but it's a storybook city created entirely on soundstages and warmed by lighting and production design that favor pinks and reds. Here, an aspiring singer named Victoria Grant (Andrews) grows faint with hunger and is pestered by her landlord for overdue rent, as she desperately auditions for cabaret gigs that she never gets, because her classically trained soprano clashes with the louche milieu of Parisian nightlife. She's particularly ill-suited for Chez Lui, a gay nightclub where the current act is a self-described "old queen" with a resonant baritone named Carroll Todd a/k/a "Toddy" (Robert Preston, The Music Man). Still, Toddy is impressed with Victoria's voice, and when the two meet later by chance at a restaurant, they strike up a friendship.

It is Toddy who has the inspiration to create the most sensational drag act Paris has ever seen by by disguising Victoria as a man and presenting her as his Polish boyfriend and protégé, "Count Victor Grazhinsky". Since "Victor" is really a she, "his" female impersonations will be utterly convincing. The tricky part is teaching Victoria to pass as a man. After much training and rehearsal, and more than a few moments of panic, "Victor" impresses Paris' top theatrical agent, Andre Cassell (John Rhys-Davies), who books him for a a triumphant debut at Chez Lui. All of Paris flocks to see the new nightclub sensation, and Toddy and Victoria rejoice in their new-found fame and fortune as they relocate to sumptuous digs at a posh hotel.

But there's a problem. One of the luminaries that Andre has invited to Victor's debut is a Chicago-based club owner and gangster named King Marchand (James Garner, reuniting with Andrews for the first time since The Americanization of Emily). A hard-drinking, cigar-chomping man's man with a brassy stripper named Norma for a girlfriend (Lesley Ann Warren), King can't believe that the woman he sees singing and dancing on stage isn't the real thing, and he's shocked to find himself falling for someone he believes to be a man. Though continuing to hide behind her impersonation, Victoria is similarly attracted to King. Things get especially complicated when the outraged Norma realizes that she's losing King's affection . . . to a guy!

Edwards stages Victor's cabaret numbers with bright lights, fancy costumes and elaborate choreography, and Andrews performs the original songs with the gorgeous intonations that made her a singing sensation, but the true glory of VV is its physical comedy, which no one was better at staging than Edwards. Only someone with Edwards' confidence would shoot an entire restaurant full of patrons in an uproar (over the discovery of a cockroach) from outside the establishment, letting the pandemonium play out in pantomime. Only a director with Edwards' precision timing would precede that scene with a series of sardonic comments by a waiter (Graham Stark, a regular in the director's films), who then returns late in VV to deliver the scene's deferred punchline. Only Edwards could have staged the extended (and mostly silent) comic ballet in which King Marchand breaks into Victor's hotel suite to spy on the singer, closely followed by his faithful bodyguard, Squash (Alex Karras), with much of it witnessed by a hapless hotel guest (Norman Alden) who just wants to put out his shoes to be polished. And only Edwards would have the wit to place "Victor's" audition for Andre off-screen, so that it's heard but not seen, while the camera captures an ingenious pratfall by a bit player.

As in Shakespeare's comedies involving cross-dressing, VV has a serious subtext about how men and women relate to each other, but the thoughtful moments slide in so effortlessly amidst the comic hijinks that you almost don't notice. Andrews, Preston and Warren give bravura, Oscar-nominated performances, while Garner's King (who should have been nominated) anchors the proceedings with a bewildered gravitas. Meanwhile, the supporting cast, especially Alex Karras as Squash, nearly steals the show.

Victor/Victoria Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Victor Victoria was photographed by British cinematographer Dick Bush, who was versatile enough to shift from the psychedelia of Ken Russell's Tommy  to the dark jungles of William Friedkin's Sorcerer. Bush made a conscious decision to light VV warmly, even when the characters are cold and wet, which casts a jovial fairy-tale sheen over the proceedings. Previous versions of VV for DVD and broadcast have been sourced from a 1080i master made in 2001 and approved by Blake Edwards. However, for the film's Blu-ray debut, the Warner Archive Collection created a new interpositive, which was scanned at 2K for VV's first-ever 1080p presentation. The earlier, Edwards-approved master was used as a reference for color-correction, along with other archival resources.

The result on this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a brilliantly colored and beautifully detailed image that does full justice to Edwards' widescreen compositions, including the many long shots of precisely staged physical comedy. The film's elaborate set design (which, according to Edwards, caused the budget to jump to levels that alarmed the studio) and the intricately detailed costumes—both categories were Oscar-nominated—are visible in all the delightful artificiality that characterizes Edwards' rendition of Paris in the Thirties, a place as artfully constructed as the illusion of Victoria pretending to be a man. Individual faces and figures are readily distinguishable in crowded bars and nightclubs, as well as the intricate dance routines. The palette ranges from the intense primary hues of the Count's cabaret performances to the sour earth tones of the local bar where King goes to blow off steam. Blacks are deep and solid, and the film's grain texture is finely resolved. WAC has mastered VV at its usual high average bitrate of just under 35mbps.

Note: Since this review was published, an error has been identified in which one shot has been substituted for another during a dance routine. For further information, please go here.

Victor/Victoria Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Victor Victoria was released theatrically with a matrixed Dolby Surround mix built from four discrete channels (left, center, right and mono surround). The soundtrack was remixed in a 5.1 configuration for DVD, and that same mix has been used for the Blu-ray, but encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The surrounds are employed primarily for the instrumentation of the musical numbers, but they sound terrific and the vocals have been well integrated. The dialogue is clear, and the dynamic range is broad, though more obviously so at the high end than the low. (The sound of glass being shattered by Victoria's sustained B-flat is a running joke.) Edwards' favorite composer, Henry Mancini, wrote both the songs (with lyrics by Leslie Bricusse) and the charming score.

Victor/Victoria Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2002 DVD of Victor Victoria. Included is a small DVD "easter egg". The trailer has been remastered in 1080p.

• Commentary with Writer/Director Blake Edwards and Actress Julie Andrews: This is a chatty and informal (but informative) conversation between two long-time collaborators who also happen to be husband and wife. Both recall the experience of making Victor/Victoria with great fondness, and their shared warmth makes the commentary a separate entertainment in its own right.



• DVD Easter Egg (480i; 1.33:1; 0:36): Titled "Blake on Julie", this is a short excerpt from an interview with Edwards.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.40:1; 2:23): With its flashing graphics and quick glimpses of signature scenes, this is one of the rare trailers that captures the spirit of the film it is promoting.

Victor/Victoria Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My two favorite Blake Edwards films are Victor Victoria and his Hollywood satire S.O.B., and I would be hard-pressed to choose between them. VV is unique in Edwards' filmography for its distinctive blend of music, farce and gender-bending comedy. It's also a visual feast that, thanks to WAC, can be newly appreciated in all its splendor. Highest recommendation (but see the "Note" in the Video section).