Image: Theatre safety curtain. Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright.
Victor/Victoria is a film built on a glorious confusion, and James Garner is the man at the centre of it. Directed by Blake Edwards from the 1933 German comedy Viktor und Viktoria, the film stars Julie Andrews as Victoria Grant, a struggling soprano in 1930s Paris who, with the help of the gay cabaret performer Toddy, played by Robert Preston, reinvents herself as Victor, a male female impersonator — a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Victor becomes a sensation. Among the audience is King Marchand, played by Garner, a Chicago nightclub owner with mob connections, who finds himself powerfully attracted to Victor and profoundly confused about why. That confusion is the film’s comic engine, and Garner plays it with perfect, masculine bewilderment.
King Marchand is, on paper, the last man who would question his own certainties. He is tough, successful, used to getting what he wants, and accompanied everywhere by his brassy girlfriend Norma, played by Lesley Ann Warren, and his loyal bodyguard Squash, played by Alex Karras. Garner plays King with a wonderful mixture of swagger and vulnerability. He is a gangster, but a Garner gangster: charming rather than frightening, direct rather than devious, and — crucially — honest with himself in a way that most of the film’s characters are not. When he feels an attraction to Victor, he does not deny it or dress it up. He investigates it, with the dogged literal-mindedness of a man who has always trusted his instincts and now finds his instincts telling him something unexpected.
That investigation drives the film’s best scenes. King follows Victor, watches the act again, tries to prove to himself that Victor must be a woman, and slowly, hilariously, comes to terms with the possibility that he might be attracted to a man — and then with the relief of discovering that Victor is, after all, a woman. Garner’s comic timing here is superb. He plays King’s dawning self-knowledge not as a crisis played for laughs at gay people’s expense, but as a genuinely human moment: a tough man discovering that his categories were too small for his feelings. The film’s famous subplot, in which Squash reveals that he, too, is gay, reinforces the point with warmth rather than mockery. Victor/Victoria is, for a mainstream 1982 comedy, remarkably generous toward its gay characters, and Garner’s open, unembarrassed performance is a large part of why that generosity works.
Edwards directs the film as a lavish, old-fashioned musical comedy, with songs by Henry Mancini and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse that are performed as nightclub acts rather than as spontaneous outbursts of song. The Paris of the film is a beautiful artifice: glittering clubs, elegant costumes, and a 1930s glamour that feels both nostalgic and knowingly theatrical. Within that artifice, Garner provides a grounding force. Where Andrews is luminous and Preston is flamboyantly theatrical, Garner is solid, American and wry — the audience’s surrogate, the man who walks into this world of mirrors and tries to make sense of it. His scenes with Andrews have a lovely, slow-burning chemistry. They are both performers, in different ways, and their romance works because each recognises the performance in the other and loves the person underneath it.
It is also a reminder of Garner’s range. He had spent much of the previous decade as Jim Rockford, television’s most likeable detective, and audiences might have expected him to stay in that comfortable groove. Instead, he took a supporting role in a musical comedy about gender and identity, opposite one of the great musical stars, and held his own without ever trying to out-sing or out-dance anyone. He understood that King’s role was to be the film’s emotional anchor: the man whose journey from certainty to confusion to acceptance gives the farce its heart. That he does it while remaining funny throughout is a testament to his skill. Comedy and sincerity are hard to balance; Garner makes it look easy.
The film was a critical and commercial success, earning seven Academy Award nominations and winning for its music score. It also gave Garner one of his most popular film roles of the 1980s, and it led, indirectly, to his casting in Murphy’s Romance a few years later, when Sally Field and director Martin Ritt fought to cast him against studio resistance. In retrospect, Victor/Victoria stands as a turning point: proof that Garner, in his fifties, was not a nostalgia act but a vital, contemporary screen presence, capable of engaging with themes — gender, sexuality, identity — that many of his contemporaries would have avoided.
Seen today, Victor/Victoria remains a delight, and Garner’s King Marchand remains its secret weapon. He is the tough guy who learns to be tender, the certain man who learns to be curious, and the gangster who discovers that love does not always arrive in the package you expected. That Garner plays all of this with a grin, a shrug and a perfectly timed double-take is exactly why he was so beloved. King Marchand may have come to Paris looking for a nightclub act. What he found was a woman, a mystery and a new understanding of himself — and James Garner made that discovery feel like the most natural thing in the world.
The film’s musical numbers deserve a final word, because they show how Edwards used performance as a metaphor for identity. Every song in Victor/Victoria is presented as an act, a construction, a version of a person offered to an audience — and King’s journey is, in the end, a journey from watching an act to knowing a person. Garner, who was never a musical performer, understood that dynamic instinctively. He watches Andrews perform with the attention of a man learning to see past the spotlight, and his face, in those moments, tells the film’s story more eloquently than any lyric. That attentive watching is a small, generous piece of acting, and it is why King’s eventual happiness feels earned rather than merely plotted.