Murder at the Windmill [Mystery at the Burlesque] *** (1949, Garry Marsh, Jack Livesey, Jon Pertwee, Diana Decker, Jimmy Edwards, Peter Butterworth) – Classic Movie Review 11,049

Writer-director Val Guest’s 1949 black and white British crime thriller Murder at the Windmill [Mystery at the Burlesque] is an early production by Nat Cohen, and stars Garry Marsh, Jack Livesey and Jon Pertwee, and features The Windmill Theatre Troupe performers. It is shot at Walton Studios and partly at the theatre, as the first film to show footage inside the Windmill Theatre.

A stalls audience member at the titular saucy Soho London revue theatre The Windmill (known for the titillating delights of the ‘Windmill Girls’) is murdered, shot dead from the stage during a performance. So the Metropolitan police (Garry Marsh as the Detective Inspector, Jon Pertwee as the Detective Sergeant) get the cast to re-stage the show, whose star Donald (Donald Clive) is the number one suspect because his girlfriend Patsy (Jill Anstey) has attracted unwanted attentions from the deceased.

It is a rather improbable premise for a low-grade murder mystery with much of an entire Windmill theatre performance by the girls actually working there going through their real routines to jolly things along. The strippers and erotic dancers and the musical song and dance numbers are much more entertaining than the creaky mystery plot and the contrived script.

The sprightly handling, fragrant theatre atmosphere and nice hard-working cast provide further compensations, and there is something sneakily quite appealing about this old movie with its fragrant flavour of the theatre and a bygone London. At the theatre a comedian performed in between each act, and iconic comic Jimmy Edwards appears as himself.

Jack Livesey plays the prominent real-life British theatre impresario Vivian Van Damm (28 June 1889 – 14 December 1960), who managed the Windmill Theatre in London’s Great Windmill Street from 1932 until 1960. The theatre was infamous for its pioneering tableaux vivants of motionless female nudity, thus getting round the theatre censorship of the day, and for having ‘never closed’ during the London Blitz. Obviously, the film had to clean the act up a little bit to get round the theatre censorship of the day.

Also in the cast are Diana Decker, Jimmy Edwards, Eliot Makeham, Peter Butterworth, Donald Clive, Jill Anstey, Margo Johns, Pamela Deeming, Ivan Craig, John Powe, Anita D’Ray, Johnnie Gale, Genine Graham, Constance Smith, Barry O’Neill and Robin Richmond.

Val Guest wrote two songs for the film, Two Little Dogs and I’ll Settle For You, and other songs include King’s Night Out, Mexico, Life Should Go With A Swing, and A Modern Romeo, with The Storming of the Bastille and Enchantment also on the soundtrack.

It premiered in London on 10 May 1949 and was released on 6 June 1949.

Murder at the Windmill [Mystery at the Burlesque] is directed by Val Guest, runs 70 minutes or 58 minutes (US), is made by Angel Productions, is released by Grand National Pictures (1949) (UK) and Monogram Pictures (1950) (US), is written by Val Guest (original screenplay), is shot in black and white by Bert Mason, is produced by Daniel M Angel and Nat Cohen, is scored by Ronald Hanmer and Philip Martell (musical director) and designed by Bernard Robinson.

The Windmill famously boasted that during World War Two `We never closed’ (or humorously ‘We never clothed’) but it is now sadly long closed. The Windmill nude revue began in 1932 and lasted until the theatre reverted to a cinema in 1964. The theatre did remain open in the war, except for the compulsory closure that affected all theatres for 12 days from 4 to 16 September in 1939.

British film producer and executive Nat Cohen (23 December 1905 – 10 February 1988) was for over four decades one of the most important figures in the British film industry, particularly as head of Anglo-Amalgamated and EMI Films.

On the opening night of every new Windmill show, the Royal Box would be reserved for the Hon George Lansbury, a member of His Majesty’s Government and grandfather of Angela Lansbury.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,049

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