Mrs. Henderson Presents

As released on DVD by The Weinstein Company, Mrs. Henderson Presents is a pleasant, lightweight entertainment. Literately written by Martin Sherman (author of Bent) and ably directed by Stephen Frears, the film is a stylishly tongue-in-cheek British evocation of old-style Hollywood musicals.

"Inspired" as it says, by actual events, it tells of London's Windmill Theatre, which alone remained open during the Blitz, bringing cheer to civilians and soldiers on leave through some of the city's darkest hours. Its five continuous daily shows could, thanks to being below street level, defy the aerial bombardments. Even a very near miss proved scarcely more disrupting than a white mouse, allegedly released onstage by a prankster, causing the nude living statues to scamper off.

Ah, nude girls! The theater was owned by a rich widow-the heroine here, Laura Henderson-who ran it in conjunction with an experienced showman, Vivian Van Damm, to whom she eventually bequeathed it. And yes, this was the first time in England that, during the Windmill revues, nude girls in immobile artistic poses were permitted by the Lord Chamberlain, presumably as morale boosters.

Around these facts, the film spins a fairly conventional but ingratiating story, interspersed with amiable vaudeville routines and nicely sung and choreographed quasi-period song and dance numbers, including charming pastiche music by George Fenton. The constantly sparring but basically affectionate Henderson (Judi Dench) and Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) evoke memories of those '30s and '40s American movie musicals, as does a somewhat sketchy love affair between a showgirl and a soldier. Andrew Dunn's cinematography should not go without mention.

Yet what truly lifts the film above the routine is the performance of Dame Judi Dench. Though Hoskins and the rest-notably Christopher Guest as a Lord Chamberlain twisted around Laura's pinkie-do fine work, it is the great, shining-eyed actress who deploys a special denchantment.

The very title of John Miller's excellent biography, Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice, pinpoints one of her fortes: a voice that can go from silken soprano to corrugated contralto in a trice, always to [IMG:R]sound dramatic effect. Next, a face that without being glamorous has a comforting, foursquare openness, and which Dench can totally transform from expression to expression with utmost ease. And each expression really counts, whether it tickles your funnybone or skewers your heart.

But the most marvelous transition is Judi Dench's smooth progress from sexy ingénue through mature actress to benevolent grande dame without a hiatus, with assurance and endurance very few can match. Of her first professional appearance in 1957, as Ophelia to John Neville's Hamlet at the Old Vic, Kenneth Tynan wrote, "The Ophelia, Judi Dench, is a pleasing but terribly sane little thing." And sure enough, she has parlayed that "terrible sanity" into becoming the sanest, the least actressy, of our era's great English actresses.

In her autobiography, Vanessa Redgrave recalled her classmate Judi Dench at the Central School of Speech and Drama as already "confident enough to speak in her own voice." That voice has since enriched the world's screens and stages in all its cracked magnificence.

You can read John Simon on Theatre every weekend at www.bloomberg.com