Several new releases try a freer portrayal of homosexuality
"There's nothing more inconvenient than an old queen with a head cold," Toddy sniffles as he contemplates being down and out in Paris, 1934. He has just lost his job in a gay nightclub, his lover has left him, and his new roommate, Victoria (Julie Andrews), is a singer with a voice that can shatter glass but not the indifference of booking agents.
Toddy, who is played with great good spirit by Robert Preston, speaks too soon. For the old queen is anything but an object of pity. Since his new pal looks so dapper in the suit she borrows from him after her clothes have been ruined in a rainstorm, he shrewdly conceives the idea of having her become a female female impersonator: in other words, a woman who plays a man playing women.
Things get really delirious when James Garner, as a determinedly heterosexual gangster from Chicago, falls for her/him. "I'm not a man!" she cries when he finally embraces her. "I don't care if you are," he replies. As he squires her around, the world is bound either to mistake him for a homosexual or learn the truth about her, which will destroy a very promising career. To further complicate matters, the gangster's bodyguard (sweetly played by former Detroit Lions Tackle Alex Karras), encouraged by what he takes to be a conversion by his master, comes out of the closet and starts an affair with the ever amiable Toddy.
In short, by the end of Victor/ Victoria, Writer-Director Blake Edwards ("10," The Pink Panther series) has managed to overturn virtually all his characters' sexual roles and the audience's expectations as well. He has also made, in the midst of much well-timed farce, a fairly serious point: namely that sexual identities have precious little to do with the qualities, moral and otherwise, that make people good, attractive or fun to be with.
Besides being perhaps the most entertaining American comedy since the last Edwards film (S.O.B.), Victor/Victoria adds further proof that, like Toddy in the film, homosexuals are ceasing to be an inconvenience to moviemakers. Already out and doing quite well in the theaters is Making Love, in which a terribly nice fellow (Michael Ontkean) leaves his terribly nice wife (Kate Jackson) to take up with a not-quite-so-nice novelist (Harry Hamlin) before he finds a more stable male mate. Also doing well is Personal Best, which purposely makes no big deal about the fact that its two leading figures (played by Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly) indulge in a lesbian affair while pursuing their careers as Olympic-level track athletes.
Making Love is a case of the bland leading what its creators consider to be the blind. Says Director Arthur Hiller of his highly sanitized love scenes: "We weren't trying to say this is how gays make love. This is terribly new for most of the country, so you must lead them into it gently." As for Personal Best, Writer-Director Robert Towne has come to resent his film's identification as a gay tract. "The name of the movie is not 'Personal Fruit.' There are two minutes of lovemaking and an hour of competition in it, and as far as I know, sex between any genders has not yet qualified as an Olympic event."