Victor Victoria

"A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?" Julie Andrews asks Robert Preston in Victor Victoria (1982), a gender-bending musical comedy--set in Paris in 1934--from director Blake Edwards that desperately wants to be "with it." The trouble is, Julie Andrews is far too wholesome to ever convince as a woman posing as a man-turned-female impersonator. When she auditions for a gig at the beginning of the movie--as a woman, doing opera--she's turned away after being told she's not naughty enough. If ever a movie contained a self-fulfilling prophesy, this is it.

Of course, it has some things going for it: there are laughs, some of them slapstick numbers that may be yet another sign of the director's desperation: in case you're not held by the film's plot and its faux gaudiness, you might be amused by people bashing each other over the head with blunt objects. There is one marvelous number, "Le Jazz Hot," which features Julie's voice well. And there's Robert Preston, her gay assistant who hatches the female impersonator idea in the first place. He's energetic where everyone else seems exhausted.

James Garner plays the love interest, a very masculine night club owner from Chicago who's scoping out the Paris nightclub acts with the hope of finding one that will sell. He falls for Julie during the act, before realizing she's a man (allegedly), and then spends the rest of the film feeling uptight about his masculinity. He's not particularly believable as either a night club owner who attends risque shows or a love interest for Julie Andrews.

There are some preachy values at work in Victor Victoria that make the film rather complacent. After Julie seduces James, she gives him lectures on women's lib and gender roles that feel too self-proud. Are we supposed to reward the movie for being a champion of civil liberties? (Then again, there were quite a few "message" comedies from the late 70s and early 80s that decided at some point to look straight into the camera and preach, and most of them were nominated for Academy Awards.)

Garner's girlfriend, a ditzy blonde with a shrill voice (she reminds you of Jean Hagen from Singin' in the Rain), is played by Lesley Ann Warren. With Alex Karras, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm Jamieson. 133 min. ★★

Clue

Clue (1985) is, I think, the kind of movie you appreciate more as a kid than as an adult. From my grown-up mind, it seems pretty hair-brained to try and adapt a board game into a movie. But I remember how thrilled I was to discover, retroactively you might say, that someone had turned my favorite murder-mystery-board-game into a feature film, a comedy no less, with some of my favorite actors!

Madeline Kahn, the underrated, red-headed beauty with that unmistakable voice (Megan Mullally may be her distant cousin), donning a black wig as Mrs. White; and Lesley Ann Warren, who I remembered from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella. Warren and Kahn both have beautiful singing voices, but neither of them ever really got to do as much with their voices in the movies (at least, not as much as I would have liked). There was Kahn's astonishingly funny and naughty performance as Lily Von Schtpp, the German saloon singer a la Marlene Dietrich, in Blazing Saddles, and Warren's effortless-looking performance as a floozy with a shrill, unsophisticated voice (not unlike Jean Hagen's in Singin' in the Rain) in Victor/Victoria, but as much as their talents were on display in these films, these women were never really given their due.

I think both of them shine in Clue, which isn't a particularly sophisticated comedy. It's not even a very well-thought-out comic mystery, about as subtle as Neil Simon's amusing but misfired Murder By Death. In Clue, Lesley Ann Warren plays Miss Scarlet, and she looks stunning and comfortable playing a cool bad girl, someone who once ran a brothel in Washington D.C. Warren is at her best here because she's not acting the dumb blonde: I think she's funnier when she's smart. And Kahn, as Mrs. White, delivers a subtly insane performance that may not stand out next to Lily from Blazing Saddles or Elizabeth from Young Frankenstein, and yet it's appropriately weird and Kahn-esque.

The plot of Clue is about what you'd expect from a movie adaptation of a game. The six suspects (Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, et al) are gathered at an ominous Victorian mansion on a dark and stormy night (the film is needlessly set in 1954 so that it can exhaust the already exhausted limits of the comic value of the Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover). They are confronted with various crimes (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and then it's revealed that the seventh guest, Mr. Boddy, is blackmailing all of them. Pretty soon, Boddy winds up dead, and the task of figuring out whodunit is put on them.

The jokes are hit and miss, and the story itself fizzles out long before the movie ends. But the performances make it worth seeing, particularly that of Tim Curry, as the butler and the man who's ultimately running the show. Curry's energy is unmatched. He's like a wind-up toy that keeps going and going despite all the punishing efforts of the children who are winding him up and laughing every time he runs into a wall or falls on his face. Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, and Lee Ving co-star. Written by the director, Jonathan Lynn, from a story idea by John Landis, and produced by Debra Hill. ★★½