[A good Newspaper I have read]----The New York Times(2)

In ''Victor/Victoria'' it's men dressed like women, women dressed like men, mistaken identities, barroom brawls, assignations interrupted, stools that collapse on cue, a thumb caught in a closet door and, later, the same thumb, wrapped in a large bandage, slammed with a hammer. It's also about an innocence that no one within the farce would ever for a minute recognize. The characters in ''Victor/Victoria'' don't have time for such analyses - they're too busy working on schemes that will inevitably go wildly, unexpectedly wrong.

It's no accident that the ''Pink Panther'' films, ''10,'' and ''S.O.B.'' are all the work of Blake Edwards, the foremost farceur in films today, whose latest comedy, ''Victor/Victoria,'' is the most stylish and consistently lunatic movie he has done to date. Mr. Edwards doesn't have much competition. Good film farces have become only slightly less rare than high-toned dramas in blank verse.

Almost all of Woody Allen's films have farcical moments, but none of his recent films has exercised the prerogatives of farce displayed in ''Take the Money and Run,'' ''Bananas'' and ''Sleeper.'' Mel Brooks is capable of farce (''The History of the World - Part One'') but he seems to prefer parody and satire. ''Airplane!'' is one of the funniest comedies made in the last 10 years, though it's less a farce than a gargantuan parody. Steve Gordon's ''Arthur'' is a screwball comedy, updated.(1982)

from: <The New York Times>