Over the weekend, Shannon and I watched Mrs. Henderson Presents, last year's Judi Dench/Bob Hoskins flick. I was interested to see it because of the setting - Britain during the Depression and early phase of World War II - and because it's based on the true story of a upper-class widow who convinced the British government to let her continue to offer nude revue shows during the war on the grounds that the shows would improve morale. It's a promising idea, and the movie partly carries it off.
But by the halfway point, the movie settles for being droll, rather than funny, and cedes its comic potential by using some really painful cliches: the most beautiful member of the revue troupe dies in a bombing raid after she gets pregnant by a soldier who then abandons her - that's practically Friday the Thirteenth-level virgin-punishment. Even more painfully, the film's climax is a really strange speech by Mrs. Henderson in which she defends the revue on the grounds that soldiers shouldn't have to go off to fight and die without ever having seen a naked woman - a fate suffered by her son, who died in the Great War. The speech carried no water for me; I can't believe it did much for the censors and rationing officials in London during the Blitz.
Worst of all, the film omits a consideration of the really interesting question of why and how women (and specifically, their bodies) explained "why we fight." In this case, of course, not only are the naked young women literally sold and displayed to soldiers who are shortly off to war, but Mrs. Henderson goes much further, arranging the fateful liaison between her star model and the soldier who leaves her pregnant. Leaving aside my own feelings about the politics and morality of instrumentalizing women in these ways, it strikes me as bad filmmaking not to examine this problem - even comedically - in a movie that culminates with a speech which supposedly solves it.