User Reviews

Not many British nudie films can claim to be the byproduct of a property purchase,or star a 25 year old Pauline Collins but those are the two claims to fame of Secrets of a Windmill Girl. Set around the famous striptease venue The Windmill Theatre-which prided itself on being the only theatre in London to stay open during the blitz-Secrets of a Windmill Girl's curious start in life is arguably allot more interesting than the final result. The Windmill's owner Vivian Van Damm had died and his daughter Sheila sold the Windmill to Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger then operating under the name the Compton Cinema Group. Together they had started one of the first 'membership only' cinemas,which used a legal loophole to bypass the censor and show uncut sex films (with names like Love Play Between Friends and Society of Shame) to men paying 10 shillings for year long membership. Compton had begun film production of their own and naturally enough it wasn't long before they hit on the idea to make a nudie film in and about their own premises. By all accounts Secrets of a Windmill Girl was originally envisioned as a straightforward recording of an average night in a striptease venue-showing the acts and the real people behind the glitz and the glamour. An idea later realized in James Katz's 1977 documentary The Rise and Fall of Ivor Dickie. The film didn't quite pan out as such however,and this footage was woven into a fictional narrative-typical stuff of B-movies and lurid paperbacks-charting the career of Windmill girl Pat Lord (Pauline Collins) from cradle to "burnt out husk, on the verge of a nervous breakdown". Pat's fate is no mystery,she dies in a drug-fuelled car accident at the beginning of the film,scenes of an Inspector chatting to her distraught best friend and fellow Windmill girl Linda Grey form the wraparound sequence of her story. First seen as highly unconvincing schoolgirls Pat and Linda begin their careers in a shoe shop working for a bald letch but are soon off seeking fame and fortune at the Windmill theatre. Both duly pass the audition and are soon fully fledged Windmill girls but while Linda remains a demure 'nice' girl,daredevil Pat is soon hanging around coffee bars and dancing on tables ("she was beginning to get a star complex" observes Linda). Not to mention partying with bohemians,swingers,lesbians and West End producers. Fragments of the original 'striptease-verite' concept still exist in the film,as Linda feels obliged not just to tell the Inspector about Pat but just about everyone else who works the Windmill from Irene from Kent to Ben the doorman,Sienna and Deirdre the rival flat mates etc,etc. Peeks into the mundane home life of these (real) people are certainly a far cry from the glittery netherworld they inhabit by night (and the sensationalist nature of the fictional plot). Linda also tells the Inspector about the Windmill's acts as well-a good excuse as any to pad the film out with the routines of second rate comics,magicians and song-and-dance men. While its fascinating to see the kind of show that passed for cheap thrills throughout the 40's,50's and 60's,its also quite clear why Compton thought the proceedings needed some fictional oomph in the form of Pat's exploits. Aside from 'the boys and girls of the Windmill' there are quite a few characters here-clearly jobbing around the West End at the time-who would break out of the poverty row milieu. Peter Gordeno later of UFO essentially plays himself a dance choreographer in the film,there's a brief glimpse of current day Eastender Derek Martin towards the end as well as Dana Gillespie strumming away in the background of a swinger's party scene. Dana looks uncomfortable-and not without good reason-the obscenely tight top the producers have squeezed her into is enough to warrant the film's X certificate in itself.

By rights the unlikely mixture of dope-smoking,catfights,stripping and Pauline Collins sounds like it should make for a not-unentertaining film,unfortunately Arnold Louis Miller wasn't what you would call the worlds most exciting director and the end result can be a bit of a chore to get though. Miller's career lay almost exclusively in early nudist films and later cinema programme filler travelogues,though Windmill Girl suggests the work of someone prolific in television ads and public information films of the time which it shares a flat, highly set-bound look. Only two sequences-the climax and a swinging party turned gang rape suggest any real flair. The latter,all nightmarish red tinted P.O.V. shots of Pat being overpowered by stocking masked perverts being worthy of a psychedelic horror film,while the former is the stuff of great kitchen sink drama with Pat hollering to a grotesquely staggish crowd how she's gonna be a big star of the West End. "I am a real artiste"she tells the crowd who in turn drown her out with cries of "c'mon dear,get em off'.

By the time the film was released the Windmill had closed and it must have seemed dated even then,Cinema X referred to as a 'collectors corner' item. The sentimental song at the end of the film "the Windmill girls they were so gay,but now its over,they've gone away" seems to mourn not only the passing of the ill-fated Pat but of an age. However like many 'before they were famous' features Secrets of a Windmill Girl has had a second life. It was released on UK video in the early 1980s with the tape claiming to offer punters Pauline Collins "as you've never seen her before". They also hacked the title down to Secrets in order to disguise the films vintage. More than likely Pauline has long forgotten about Secrets of a Windmill Girl or at least doesn't go to great lengths to have films from her past suppressed,unlike ahem……a certain Lady Weinberg. So now its back on US DVD and you can see her in the film and on the cover in all her fallen woman with a beehive glory.

During the thirties, forties and fifties the Windmill Theatre in London was a noted venue for semi-erotic revues featuring scantily dressed showgirls. The shows involved nude "tableaux" in which the models did not move, but never striptease. The theatre closed in 1964, however, partly because of competition from strip clubs which, because they were technically men's clubs rather than theatres were exempt from Britain's system of theatrical censorship which was not abolished until 1967.

"Secrets of a Windmill Girl" was made in 1966 as a tribute to the girls of the Windmill Theatre. It opens with the death of a young woman named Pat Lord in a road crash. The rest of the film is essentially one long flashback, telling the story of Pat's life as narrated by her close friend Linda Grey to the detective investigating her death. After leaving school, Pat and Linda found work as sales assistants in a shoe-shop, but soon afterwards left to fulfil their long standing ambition to become professional dancers. They find jobs at the Windmill Theatre and work there as part of its cast of showgirls until it closes. Much of the film takes the form of a semi-documentary look at the daily life of a Windmill Girl; the scriptwriter seems to have lost sight of the fact that Linda is supposedly talking to a police detective, who would not have been remotely interested in any of these facts. It is also notable that, although Linda is supposedly from a working-class background April Wilding uses very formal English and talks with an upper-class accent. (Pauline Collins as Pat is more convincing in this respect).

The film was obviously intended as an exploitation movie aimed at a young male audience who would be happy to watch anything featuring a line-up of half-naked girls. It was, significantly, originally released in Britain as part of a double bill with the nudist film "Naked as Nature Intended" which featured a cast of wholly naked girls. Pat and Linda are played by professional actresses but most of their colleagues are played by former Windmill Girls. Even so, the film is curiously moralistic in tone. A sharp distinction is made between Pat and Linda. Although she spends most of her working life prancing about on a stage in a skimpy costume, the script makes it clear that Linda is at heart a decent, old-fashioned girl with sound morals.

Pat, on the other hand, is clearly no better than she ought to be, if not slightly worse than she ought to be. During her shoe-shop days she reacts to the improper suggestions of the shop's middle-aged, physically unattractive owner with righteous indignation, but as soon as she steps through the doors of the Windmill she leaves all her morals on the mat. She succumbs to the improper suggestions of Richard, a middle-aged, physically unattractive theatrical producer, who has promised her a role in one of his shows, and becomes his mistress. When the Windmill closes, the virtuous Linda is rewarded for her virtue by winning a role in a big West End production, whereas the less-than-virtuous Pat is punished. Richard fails to make good on his promises, and Pat is unable to find work except in the sort of striptease shows she despises. (The film takes the line that Windmill-type revues are all good clean fun whereas striptease is just sleazy filth). As for Pat's death, that is presented less as a tragedy than as the working-out of one of the Rules of Life, namely that young women who are slightly worse than they ought to be are sooner or later bound to find themselves in the company of young men who drive their sports cars too fast and without regard to road safety.

Something which is never explained is exactly why Pat is unable to find work after the Windmill closes. West End casting directors, after all, normally pay more attention to talent than they do to people's private lives, and there is no suggestion that Pat is untalented. Indeed, it is even implied that she is a better dancer than the more successful Linda. Even if Pat was unable to find a job honestly, she could probably have found one dishonestly through Richard. Producers who operate on the "casting couch" basis generally find that they need to keep their promises unless they want to acquire the sort of reputation which would make it impossible to use that particular seduction technique in future.

The film's moralistic subtext seems ridiculous today and, indeed, I doubt if anyone took it very seriously even in 1966. It was probably a device to placate the censors in case they took exception to the sexy dance routines. Even in the seventies this film would have looked very dated, and in 2018 it looks like a curious fossil preserved from some strange prehistoric era. April Wilding seems to have disappeared without trace, but Pauline Collins went on to become a major figure in the British acting world, starring in "Shirley Valentine", one of the best British films of the eighties. "Secrets of a Windmill Girl" must be one of the entries on her CV that she keeps very quiet about. 4/10