Mrs. Henderson Presents

Who is the audience for this film, Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears? It's the BBC equivalent of a PBS film: civilized, witty, stale. Not that this was a BBC production, but it could have been. The intended audience I assume is middle-aged, upper middle-class, a group that thinks of itself as appreciative of high-toned entertainment. With Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins in the lead roles, the audience gets what it wants.

The film feels like a stage play. It takes place during the 1930s and 40s in London. When Laura Henderson's husband dies, she buys a dilapidated theatre in Soho and opens a stage review. She hires Vivian Van Damm (Hoskins ) to direct the reviews. After initial success, their reviews begin to lose money, and Mrs. Henderson decides to stage nude reviews, with attractive naked women posed like statues to avoid censure by the Lord Chamberlain. The reviews are highly successful, and the theatre stays open through the Second World War, even during the blitz. "We Never Closed" is the review's motto.

This film's subplots are fortunate since the main plot is thin and the novelty of musical numbers staged around nude women posed as statues quickly wears thin. Van Damm is a solicitous father figure to the girls in the review. Reluctant at first to pose nude, they are convinced by his argument that he is asking them to take part in the creation of art. Mrs. Henderson and Van Damm have a fiery working relationship, especially after she learns he is married--she thought he was single and was attracted. Because she is lonely, she lives vicariously through the performers on stage and the soldiers who come to see the show. She arranges one particularly tragic relationship between one of the performers and a soldier. This is supposed to be sad and poignant but is really more creepy than anything else.

Towards the end of the film , when the Lord Chamberlain moves to close down the theater, Mrs. Henderson gives a speech to gathered soldiers in which she explains that after her son died in France in World War I, she found a French postcard in his bedroom and realized that he had never seen a nude woman. Because she felt this was sad, she decided to stage the nude reviews so soldiers about to go to the battlefront in Europe will have the opportunity to see nude women before they risk and maybe lose their lives. This explanation struck me as disingenuous, but the movie doesn’t sustain much close interrogation, so it is better not to worry.

This film reminds me of Topsy Turvy, or the film about the British men who strip on stage for charity (The Full Monty), and the subsequent film about middle-aged British women who do the same (Calendar Girls).

There is much wit and comic repartee here. In my favorite scene, Laura Henderson talks with the Lord Chamberlain about what to call female genitals: he wishes to call them "the midlands" or "the pudendum" while Mrs. Henderson prefers street terminology. A number of such scenes, along with the acting of Dench and Hoskins, carry the film. Without Dench, in fact, the film would be considerably less than what it is.

The fact that the film largely occurs during the London blitz enables it to capitalize on World War II nostalgia in those who remember or who would like to remember those now very distant years. The nudity of this film is neither erotic nor shocking, and the movie devotes far more time to the musical reviews surrounding the nudes than to the nudes themselves. What I didn’t find in the film was some explanation for why the women who posed nude—we are told they are good and innocent girls—actually did so. Hard economic times are cited as one reason, but that hardly seems sufficient.

Mrs. Henderson Presents is a latter-day return to World War II films, films about the home front, how people muddled through and did their parts to carry on, stiff upper lip, and all that, good fellow, yes, yes.