Drunktown’s Finest / Victor/Victoria

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Disclosure: A Trans Re-reading of American Cinema. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.

Writer-director Sydney Freeland’s hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, once described as “Drunktown, USA” in the headlines, inspired the name of her immersive debut feature. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, braids together the stories of three Navajo main characters: a young man struggling to stay out of jail, a college student adopted by white parents searching for roots and a trans woman dreaming of becoming a model. The stories seem disconnected at first, but Freeland, a trans woman who grew up on Navajo Nation land, steadily and skillfully reveals the interconnections among them. Freeland never asks her characters to choose between the false binary of tradition versus modernity. Instead she fashions a drama that narratively employs Indigenous ways of knowing to point out the boxes society places her protagonists in and how, through community and ritual, they work to free themselves.

DCP, color, 95 min. Director/Screenwriter: Sydney Freeland. With: Jeremiah Bitsui, Carmen Moore, Morning Star Wilson, Tailinh Agoyo, Loren Anthony.

In this celebrated backstage musical set in 1934 Paris, Victoria (Julie Andrews), a down-on-her-luck soprano, forges a bond with Toddy (Robert Preston), a seasoned performer whose star is fading. Together they hatch a gender-bending plan to get back into the limelight. The New York Times wrote of Andrews’ performance: “Nothing she has done before, on the stage or on the screen, probably can match the exuberant charm of her switches between Victoria and Victor.” One of the four film adaptations based on Reinhold Schunzel’s Viktor and Viktoria (1933), a comedic exploration of gender fluidity in Germany’s Weimar Republic, writer-director Blake Edwards’ version comes out of a longstanding trope in American cinema of making gender play palatable through comedic farce. Victor/Victoria pushed boundaries in a way rarely explored in Hollywood at the time of its release, which happened to be the early years of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. In this series’ titular documentary Disclosure, filmmaker and artist Zackary Drucker nods toward Victor/Victoria as an example of Hollywood’s inching toward more nuanced gender expression portrayals.

35mm, color, 134 min. Director/Screenwriter: Blake Edwards. With: Julie Andrews, Robert Preston, James Garner, Lesley Ann Warren, Alex Karras.