Victor / Victoria (1982 Blake Edwards & co-scr)

Quite promising beginning. Paris, 1934. Starving singer Julie Andrews realises - with help of Robert Preston - that she can have more success pretending to be a drag act, though frankly, her appearance as a 'man' would fool no one. And of course she doesn't fool nightclub owner James Garner, and the romantic intrigues begin. So far, so good, though at this point I haven't laughed once, but by the time we had fast forwarded the third painful musical number, and realised there was still 45 minutes to go, we abandoned ship. You have to be a confident writer to write a two hour fifteen minute comedy, like Wilder and Diamond.

With Dick Bush on camera, Ralph Winters editing and Henry Mancini providing music, it was a shame it wasn't better. Made at Pinewood, "a lovely little studio outside London... one of the assistants  came up to me on the set and asked, 'Would it worry you that Julie lights the cigar twice in the same scene?' 'Worry me?' I exclaimed. 'It would devastate me!' I raced up to the cutting room like a jackrabbit, wound the reel down, put the scene into the Moviola, and took a look. There I saw Julie lighting the cigar twice in the same scene. What made me laugh is that I had already viewed the scene cut this way and had even showed it to Blake. Neither of us noticed the miscut! Academy Award winner? Hmmmmm." (Ralph Winters, 'Some Cutting Remarks'.)