Mrs Henderson Presents

London, 1937. After her imperialist husband dies, wealthy, well-connected 69-year-old Mrs Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) staves off the boredom of widowhood by purchasing an abandoned Soho theatre, The Windmill, even though she knows nothing about how to run it. Jewish impresario Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) agrees to become its manager on condition that he has complete artistic control. Their strong personalities clash from the start and Laura's constant interference forces Vivian to ban her from rehearsal, not that this stops her infiltrating backstage disguised variously as a Chinese matron and a polar bear.

Yet their not-quite working partnership brings innovation and success to the Windmill, first with Vivian's idea of a non-stop musical revue, something never before seen in England, and then with Laura's proposal, carefully negotiated with her friend the Lord Chamberlain (Christopher Guest), that girls appear nude on stage in living tableaux. By being the only theatre to remain open throughout the London Blitz, the Windmill wins the hearts, as well as the hard-ons, of its wartime audience. In the meantime, it emerges that Laura has personal reasons for wishing young soldiers to see the pleasures of the female form before they head off to war.

In Stephen Frears' Mrs Henderson Presents (inspired, as they say, by true events), class, sex, eccentricity, sentimentality, repression, nostalgia and jingoism all join together in a rousing singsong (led by none other than Pop Idol's Will Young, as the show's resident gay vocalist Bertie). These are precisely the ingredients that have brought box-office success to previous English films (and this is a VERY English film), leaving little doubt that Frears has tried to make Mrs Henderson Presents as resolutely populist as the variety shows that were staged at the Windmill. Yet somehow the film's many parts never manage to cohere into a satisfying whole.

Certainly, with her blend of upper-class haughtiness and earthy vulgarity, Laura makes for a mesmerisingly contradictory monster of a protagonist, but it is near impossible to empathise with so outlandish and, at times, repellent a figure, while her irrepressible dominance ensures that all the other characters in her orbit seem static and soulless, not unlike the girls in the theatre's nude tableaux. The jokes, while often funny, are all basically the same, playing upon the incongruity of an elderly, respectable establishment woman talking about sex and swearing like a trooper.

Without question the film's greatest asset is Dench, who plays Laura with typical verve, while getting to show her naughtier side. Once again, as in Mrs Brown, she is a grieving widow, but Hoskins (who also produced) lacks the presence, or charisma, of Billy Connolly as her Mr Brown (and I am not referring to his full-frontal nude scene). It is made clear that much of the tension between Vivian and Laura is of a sexual kind, but why this should be so remains utterly unfathomable. In fact, for a film about London's first nude revue, Mrs Henderson Presents is unusually coy about sex and seems reluctant to engage with any moral questions about erotic entertainment, as though somehow the Thirties and Forties were a golden age of innocence where such questions were simply irrelevant. Today the Windmill is a pole-dancing club and one is left to wonder if this is really so very different, mutatis mutandis, from the use Laura envisaged for it 60 years ago.

Mrs Henderson Presents has a wonderful period feel, with stunning CGI-renderings of Piccadilly Circus intermixed with genuine newsreels of the Blitz, and some laugh-out-loud moments, but in the end it is too long and with very few surprises. Still, perfect for a day at the cinema with grandma...