Mrs. Henderson Presents' a fine film

"Mrs. Henderson Presents is packed to its British upper crust with genteel cheekiness, a film featuring copious nudity that is also noticeably modest. The disrobed beauties striking icy poses in clamshells might as well be chiseled from alabaster, which is just as the lord chamberlain dictated in this bittersweet true story about London's legendary Windmill Theater.

Laura Henderson (Judi Dench), widowed, wealthy and back in England after years in India, finds her new life to be dreadfully boring after her long colonial adventure. Charity work does not excite her, and when she finds a shuttered Picadilly Circus movie house, she endeavors to open the Windmill Theater as a 24-hour vaudeville destination. It opens in 1932 under the management of theater impresario Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) and is an instant hit.

Then every other theater in the district copies the Windmill's formula. Desperate to keep the place afloat, Henderson decides to feature nude models, a gimmick she picked up in France. Henderson prevails upon her friend Lord Cromer (Christopher Guest) to allow the disrobing. The lord chamberlain gives her one condition: They must be rigidly still, posing in "artistic tableaux. That way, their nudity will be no more bawdy than a Botticelli.

Van Damm soon assembles a cast of British beauties led by the willful, porcelain skinned Maureen (Kelly Reilly), and the Windmill becomes a sensation: lavish musical productions framed by the ever-so-still nudes. It never closes, and the theater remains open even during the Blitz, sheltering the performers from the bombing. When the government deems the operation unseemly in the early days of World War II, Henderson rallies, insisting that her models should be the images that virgin soldiers take with them before marching to battle.

Directed by Stephen Frears, "Mrs. Henderson Presents is pleasant, regal nostalgia and is almost the polar opposite of Frears' previous film, "Dirty Pretty Things. While that film starkly depicted the grimy, life-threatening drudgery of Britain's modern immigrant class, "Mrs. Henderson Presents is tweedy and respectable, seemingly taking place in a Great Britain that is either long gone or only truly existed in novels and Merchant/Ivory films.

But "Mrs. Henderson Presents is good fun, and Dench's Oscar-nominated performance as a noble woman with a libertine streak is a great kick in the pantaloons. Her relationship with Hoskins' Van Damm is almost a romance but not quite: two middle-age people who, despite their class differences, excel as rabble rousers taking the starch out of proper British society.

Archive ID: 2958137