Either Madonna is experiencing a late-career resurgence or, more likely, she is just once again demonstrating her marketing brilliance. She has a new album out, she just did the halftime show at the Super Bowl, and Friday, she's debuting a movie she's directed. It's a veritable three-pronged attack by the 53-year-old prima donna.

Her movie, W.E., is about Mrs. Wallis Simpson and her scandalous love affair and marriage to David Windsor, better known as Great Britain's King Edward the VIII. (The title refers to Wallis and Edward.) It's a fascinating story about how a King throws away his crown for a woman who was not only an American but twice-divorced too.

In a small way, this movie capitalizes on last year's Oscar winner The King's Speech - Colin Firth plays Edward's stuttering brother who has to take over as King.

Often dismissed as an evil temptress, an unabashed seductress, Wallis is here portrayed with a little more sympathy - she's the object of HIS obsession, more than the other way around. She writes at one point, "You have no idea how hard it is to live out the romance of the century."

The woman who plays Wallis is a relative unknown, Andrea Riseborough, but she perfectly embodies the oddball appeal and intensity of the waif-like Baltimore socialite. And James D'Arcy is fine in the somewhat smaller role as Edward.

The real problem with the movie is that Wallis' story is only half the movie. The other half is a contemporary tale about a fictional Manhattan woman who also is named Wallis (her mother was a rare Wallis Simpson fan). She deals with her own marital problems by projecting herself into her namesake's life. She does her best to resolve her troubles with love by also resolving her obsession with "the romance of the century."

This half of the movie is simply not very compelling, especially when compared to the inherently dramatic story of the historical couple. By having to share screen time with the mopey contemporary story, the Wallis/Edward story gets short shrift. Jettisoning the Manhattanite Wallis would have meant more time for the real Wallis. As it is, she remains a character rich with possibilities but woefully underdeveloped.

A fascinating aspect to Wallis Simpson was her curious allure. The movie briefly raises the subject when she's described as certainly NOT the most beautiful woman in the world. In fact, she's deemed rather plain. When someone calls her attractive, she acidly dismisses it as just another way to say "she does her best with what she's got." So what exactly was her secret?

That question dovetails nicely with another new movie in town, a Frederick Wiseman documentary about the famous Paris nude dance revue, Crazy Horse. It recounts management's efforts to revamp the revered but tired show to appeal to a new hipper audience.

What I found most intriguing were the conversations about the definitions of "sexy." One female manager smartly suggests that eroticism for her was a careful combination of "frustration" and "imagination." And the show's artistic director talks about the difference between women under and over the age of 25. Under 25, he says, women simply count on their youth and natural beauty. It's not until they're at least 25 that they have to start "earning" or "strategizing" their looks. Under 25, women are blandly pretty; over 25, they're artistically so. In fact, he suggests, women who have been able to overcome their complexes AND their less than ideally beautiful bodies are better equipped to be seductive than their less complicated younger peers.

Maybe THAT was the secret to Wallis Simpson. (And Madonna too, she may hope. )

By TOM TANGNEY