In this time of the year, when movies

like FINAL DESTINATION 3 have a shot at being the Number 1 movie in the country, I take great solice in the fact that where I live where there are art houses.

This weekend, I saw MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, the movie that Dame Judi Dench is nominated for Best Actress for this year.

In the movie, Judi Dench plays Laura Henderson who shortly after her husband's death, to relieve her boredom, buys a West End theater, the Windmill. With his cigars and pomaded coif, Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) is the manager she hires and immediately locks horns with. He wants complete artistic freedom, she wants to meddle. After the Windmill's initial success dwindles, she comes up with idea of doing a show in which the girls onstage appear naked.


It's wartime in London, and between Blitzes the theater does a thriving business in servicemen. Despite its scandalous reputation, the show itself is relentlessly tasteful, in the manner of '40s Hollywood musicals: In order to stay within the bounds of official censorship, the girls pose decorously as tableaux vivants. They're nudie cuties serving the cause of king and country.

Dench's role is so in her comic range that it would be easy to mistake it as her doing it in her sleep. The key to her performance is the depth of feeling beneath the imperiousness.
Henderson is nobody's fool, but as the film rolls along we start to realize that it is foolish passion she truly craves.
She finds it with Van Damm, who is as no-nonsense as she is. (Theirs is a real-life story). Van Damm and Mrs. Henderson are forever fighting each other because, of course, they recognize how much alike they are. Although Van Damm has a wife, his bickering with Mrs. Henderson mimics a marriage in which the jabs are really love pats. In one particularly memorable comic scene, an assistant interrupts the two of them at full throttle and is informed by Mrs. Henderson that "you must never interrupt a perfectly good argument."

There is plenty of Wit like that in MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, compliments of Screenwriter Martin Sherman, who is at his best with these kinds of exchanges, and Director Stephen frears keeps things moving briskly along. The film is crafted very well: you watch the emotions slide from Witty Banter to utter sadness in one fell swoop, and at no time do you ever feel like you are being manipulated emotionally by a bunch of hucksters.

The director, like his actors, understands how high theatrics especially with show people, often hides deeper emotions.

Mrs. Henderson Presents presents theatre life with gusto! It's a nice break from the February Movie Blahs!

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