The Windmill Theatre was a London institution in its day, fully deserving of an affectionate film, which is exactly what Stephen Frears has made. He tells a true story in fictionalised form, cheating a bit with the facts but allowing two fine actors their head.
Insubstantial fare, perhaps, but nostalgic all the same for those who remember the Windmill's heyday - and entertaining for those who don't.
The two lead actors are Judi Dench, who plays Mrs Laura Henderson, the rich widow who bought the derelict theatre before the Second World War, and Bob Hoskins, as Vivian Van Damm, the shrewd Jewish impresario Henderson put in to run it.
Van Damm tried non-stop vauderville at first and then, when everyone else had copied him, was persuaded by Mrs H to try the first British nude revues. These were tableaux, so nobody could move, but naked as nature intended they were.
To do this involved squaring a nervous Censor, paying the girls reasonably well and, when the war came, persuading the government that the troops needed the Windmill, even through the Blitz. The indefatigable Mrs H managed it, aided and abetted by Van Damm.
Frears's film fleshes out the tale of the theatre with the long-running love-hate battle between Mrs H and Van Damm, and it's here that his film skims over a good many inconvenient facts. The pair are portrayed as doughty, if eccentric, heroes, battling each other at times but far too nice to be really nasty.
Dench, given some witty dialogue by writer Martin Sherman, spits it out magnificently and succeeds in making the old bag sympathetic. Hoskins, though not much like the imperious Van Damm, plays along with admirable aptitude.
Whimsy, however, is never very far away and the film's final attempt to move us with its wartime story is undermined by the lightness of its touch everywhere else.
There's truth inside Mrs Henderson Presents somewhere, but it's all a bit too charming for its own good and too many liberties seem to be taken in order to please us better.
Read More
Didn't Van Damm once sack a member of the cast in order to put his girlfriend up there instead? It's not in the film. And Mrs H's interview with Christopher Guest's Censor over lunch may be funny but it can't be anything like the truth.
Still, the film is seamlessly directed, nicely shot and Sandy Powell's designs are excellent. What with those virtues and the performances (including a very good one from Kelly Reilly as one of the Windmill girls), it gives more than a little pleasure to those tiring of vast enterprises laden with special effects.
Mrs Henderson Presents
Cert: 12A
