Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966)

Unfortunately, I don't live close enough to London to receive its local station, London Live, on Freeview. Instead, I have to make do with That's Crapchester and its schedule of a half hour 'local' news bulletin endlessly repeated, punctuated by simulcasts of The Jewellery Channel and scratchy prints of public domain movies.  London Live, by contrast, has a schedule chock full of old TV series and films which are, in some way, connected to London, (this connection can be as slim as a film having Danny Dyer in it).  The line up of films includes a number of sleazy classics, including Sex Clinic, The Sex Thief, Some Like it Sexy and The Playbirds.  If only That's Crapchester had schedules like this.  Anyway, I've recently found that it is possible to watch a lot of London LIve's output live via the web, regardless of where you are in the UK.  Consequently, I was recently able to catch most of a relatively obscure piece of British schlock: Secrets of a Windmill Girl.

This 1966 production is from the same stable as the Soho Mondos, London in the Raw and Primitive London - directed by Arnold L Miller, photographed by Stanley Long and produced by Miller, Long, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser.  Indeed, the lengthy sequences of the eponymous theatre's dancers going through their semi-naked routines were apparently shot for Primitive London, but not used in that film.  Instead, they were spliced together with a number of scripted sequences to form the basis for this drama chronicling the last days of London's notorious Windmill Theatre.  As the film itself notes, the explosion of strip clubs and adult cinemas in sixties London effectively killed the Windmill and its rather quaint form of erotica - who was going to pay to see girls engaged in mildly titillating fan dances, giving the punters flashes of bared breasts and buttocks, when they could get the full Monty much cheaper at a local strip club or fleapit?  Ironically, of course, the Windmill itself was to become a cinema - owned by Compton Cameo, producers Klinger and Tenser's company, which distributed and sometimes produced adult orientated films.  In fact, Secrets of a Windmill Girl was, I believe, the first film shown there.

Of course, being the mid-sixties, in order to get past the censors, the film has to present itself as a cautionary tale, (all that bare flesh is only there to show audiences just how disgusting and depraved the film's subject matter really is, obviously).  So, the plot, such as it is, follows a pair of young women, Pat and Linda, (played by Pauline Collins and April Wilding), who decide to embrak on careers in showbiz by becoming 'Windmill Girls' as their first step.  While Linda prospers and, after the Windmill's closure, forges a career in 'legitimate' theatre, her friend Pat ends up working the strip club circuit, endures gang rape at a party, (a vividly filmed sequence featuring her point of view as various masked faces lunge in at her, which quickly tips over into psychedelia), succumbs to drink and drugs before coming to a tragic end, (which opens the film, which then flashes back from this event to tell Pat and Linda's story).  The strip club scenes are suitably seedy, as middle aged, drunken punters leer at Pat in a manner reminiscent of her rapists, as she performs in some pretty sleazy-looking venues.  In fact, these scenes are actually surprisingly poignant, as Pat breaks down while performing, telling the uncaring audience that she's only doing this while she waits for her big break.

As drama, Secrets of a Windmill Girl is no great shakes.  You aren't going to find much in the way of titillation, either,  However, what it does provide is a vivid snapshot of mid sixties Soho and a valuable record of a now almost forgotten British institution: the Windmill Theatre.  Whole routines including the singers and comics who punctuated the dancers, are captured intact.  The dance routines themselves are fascinating: there is something not just quaint, but actually quite innocent, about the era's idea of what constituted erotica.  It's all very coy and twee.  The film draws a nice parallel between the essential tweeness and faux sophistication of the Windmill and its audiences and the rawness of the strip joints and their patrons who, in contrast to the seated and well behaved Windmill audiences, frequently get up close and personal with the girls.  The film boasts a decent performance from Pauline Collins as Pat and also features early appearances from Martin Jarvis and Peter Gordeno.  Veteran character actor Howard Marion Crawford (best remembered now for playing Dr Petrie to a whole series of Nayland Smiths in Harry Allan Towers' Fu Manchu films), pops up as Pat's agent, forever promising her a West End role, but never delivering, while Eastenders' Charlie Slater  can be glimpsed as a strip club patron near the end.  Overall, it's a good-looking film, shot with the same level of slickness that Miller and Long brought to their London Mondos.  It's a diverting ninety minutes or so, providing a fascinating look at the old Windmill Theatre in its dying days.