Like so much else in English society,
contemporary differences in styles of humor appear connected to the ancient,
burdensome stratifications of social class. In crude terms, for those who
remember the television imports of some years ago, the comic alternatives
generally split between Monty Python and Benny Hill, representing the high and
the low in English humor.
The
Monty Python Flying Circus, carried in this country on PBS, naturally,
featured a group of chinless, upper-class Oxford
twits beating a few oddball, occasionally clever ideas
to death, with sophomoric antics, purposely amateurish sets, and quite a bit of
transvestism. The
Benny Hill Show, broadcast on various secondary commercial channels,
specialized in vulgar, lower-class, music hall turns and bawdy skits and sight
gags. Monty Python appealed to a
generally more sophisticated audience and built careers for several of its cast
members, the second, though full of cheerful vitality, unfortunately died with
its creator.
The new movie, Mrs. Henderson Presents, inspired, as they say, by “true events,”
refreshingly combines some of the characteristics of both schools. It deals
with history from the perspective of privilege, but draws most of its people
and action (and entertainment) from rather lower strata of society. Its central
subject and setting, the famous Windmill Theatre in London,
belongs squarely in the grand lower-class English tradition of the music hall,
a venue for variety acts related to American vaudeville.
The film opens in 1937, with the
wealthy Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) burying her
husband and confronting the pain, loneliness, and boredom of widowhood. Willful
and independent, she looks for something to occupy her time and energies, which
leads her to the impulsive purchase of a decrepit London
theater, where she resolves to present musical revues. She hires an experienced
manager, Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins), who helps her
to realize her ambition with theatrical innovations like continuous showings of
singing, dancing, juggling, and so forth, in a variety
production they call “revuedeville.”
After an initial success, everyone
else copies their idea of continuous showings and their profits consequently
decline. Mrs. Henderson comes up with the brilliant solution of populating the
stage with nude women, which she persuades the official censor will be entirely
decorous, since the women will remain still, exactly like statues or living
versions of paintings. Van Damm scours the
countryside for fresh, unspoiled young women — “English roses” — convinces
them to disrobe, and constructs a series of musical numbers with nude tableaux
as backdrops.
The Windmill prospers through the
1930s and ’40s, enduring the Blitzkrieg with typical English fortitude when all
the other London theaters closed,
entertaining thousands of British and American soldiers. Because she lost her
only son in World War I, she sympathizes with the young men and believes they
deserve the kind of innocently sexual joy that he never experienced.
The quaintly old-fashioned musical
numbers, mostly those bouncy, tinny songs of the period, along with various
nude tableaux, provide a lively and virtually continuous display of the
Windmill’s chief attraction. They also form a backdrop of their own for a
number of subplots, including the ambiguous relationship, sometimes tense,
sometimes almost loving, between the imperious aristocrat and the lower-class
Jewish manager. The fact of the war itself also accounts for some moments of
genuine pathos, reminding us of the death and destruction that surrounded the fun
of the Windmill.
Dench and
Hoskins make a terrific pair of opposites, his nervous energy a constant
contrast to her confident hauteur; together, they perform their comic bits with
impeccable timing and convey genuine emotion in their more serious moments.
Hoskins even bravely does a full frontal nude scene to put his performers at
ease (some things a young person should not look upon), which also gives Dench one of her best throwaway lines.
The combination of broad humor and
some beautifully timed comic dialogue, along with the liveliness of the
song-and-dance numbers, perfectly fits the period look of the production,
forming a kind of tribute to the era and the people. The pretty, natural young
women, clothed and especially unclothed, remind us of the truth of Mrs.
Henderson’s analogy to sculpture and painting: since time began, the nude
female body remains a perennially beautiful subject for art and in this case,
for film.
Mrs. Henderson Presents (R),
directed by Stephen Frears, is playing at Little
Theatres and Pittsford Plaza Cinema.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2006.
