Die Nacht, als Minsky aufflog

Everyone may know William Friedkin for "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist", but this gem from before his heyday will always come to my mind. During the movie's first few minutes, you're not exactly sure where it's going, but then we meet Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt Ekland), an Amish woman who has just arrived in 1920's New York City. Not quite sure where to go in this bustling metropolis, she goes to Billy Minsky's Burlesque House. Of course, she doesn't know that burlesque involves some stuff that is perpetually anathema to the Amish lifestyle. But performer Raymond Paine (Jason Robards Jr) sees some real potential in her. Meanwhile, there are two forces at work against Rachel's potential success: her father has arrived in town to take her back to the farm, and the police are seeking to shut down the burlesque house.

Overall, "The Night They Raided Minsky's" is one of those nostalgia pieces that always has something coming. Interestingly, it was also a debut and farewell: Elliott Gould made his film debut playing Billy Minsky, and Bert "Cowardly Lion" Lahr plays a role too (he actually died while they were filming). Maybe this movie's not a masterpiece, but it's truly got something for everyone. Cool.

Why doesn't everybody just love this movie? It is one of most delightful comedies that I have ever seen. I saw it when it first came out in the cinema and watched it three times that first week and at least four times since.

It is a very stylized movie, with an introductory narration right out of the 1920's. The style carries right through the film, with wonderful vaudeville routines. The "girls" are not particularly beautiful and are, by current standards a little overweight. Also they seem to be going through the motions with a variety of personalities. They do not have beautiful singing voices and they do not dance in perfect synchronization but nobody, especially them, seems to care. Burlesque is, after all, light entertainment. The comedy skits are very simple and unintelligent but they are performed with great panache. Sir Norman Wisdom (born 1915), the great British stage and screen clown of the Charlie Chaplin ilk, and Jason Robards Jr., the dapper Oscar-winning, American actor of the classic stage are the two central male characters and are both attracted to the beautiful Amish girl who has left home to dance stories from the Bible on stage. Wisdom is a master clown and can move in ways that are magically humorous. Burlesque has two meanings, with two spellings: - a humorous and provocative stage show featuring slapstick humour, comic skits, bawdy songs, striptease acts, and a scantily clad female chorus. (Burlesk) - an artistic composition, especially literary or dramatic, that, for the sake of laughter, vulgarizes lofty material or treats ordinary material with mock dignity. (Burlesque) The movie is a burlesque about burlesk. It also makes fun of religion, stage performances, censorship, prudery, friendship, business, fraud, crime, police, audience intelligence, class distinction, love, seduction, hypocrisy, etc. The mood is intense from start to finish, with several collages of scenes from the past and the movie's present. When I was not laughing out loud, I was laughing inside. The comedy on the stage is very elementary but the comedy in the story is often quite subtle and intelligent. Back to the initial question — I think that the movie may be too stylized for many people to enjoy, especially since the style has long been almost extinct. But if one accepts the style and allows oneself to become immersed in it and flow with it, the movie can be great.

This film succeeds in both areas, comedy and nostalgia. It captures the period it portrays in wonderful fashion, with a very enthusiastic cast. I consider it one of the best cast movies I've ever seen, from the lead actors to the bit roles. Many classic burlesque routines are included, some of them done on the burlesque stage and some worked into the movie's dialogue. If you're in the mood for a comedy with a bit of feeling for another period in abundance, you can't do much better than this!

The lights dim. The curtain goes up. The girls are on stage. The spot hits the tux-wearing tenor, silver haired and a little plump.

"I have a secret recipe / Concocted with much skill / And once you've tried my special dish / You'll never get your fill...

"Take ten terrific girls, but only nine costumes, and you're cooking up something grand..."

The Night They Raided Minsky's is a valentine to the long-gone burlesque houses of the Twenties. Naughty, bawdy and surprisingly innocent, filled with chorus girls who might generously be called a little past their prime, with plenty of belly work, with comedians and their second bananas, with pratfalls, seltzer bottles and song and dance acts. This Norman Lear/William Friedkin/Ralph Rosenblum movie has it all. It even has a story. Most of all, it has some great songs by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, wonderful performances by Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom, and a collection of pungent characters played by the likes of Elliot Gould, Forrest Tucker, Bert Lahr, Harry Andrews, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Burns, Denholm Elliot and Dexter Maitland. And we're there when history is made, as Britt Ekland playing an innocent Amish girl from Smoketown, Pennsylvania, who longs to perform her Bible dances on stage, inadvertently invents the strip tease.

Billy Minsky runs Minsky's Burlesque. Vance Fowler, secretary of New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice, is determined to close it down. Then Rachel Elizabeth Schpitendavel shows up. She's young. She's innocent. She's built. She catches the eye of headliner Raymond Paine (Jason Robards), a song, dance and straight man who works with his second banana, the small, mild and fall-down physical Chick Williams (Norman Wisdom). Paine wants Rachel to fall into his bed. Chick just falls for Rachel. Minsky's, however, is on the verge of closing. Then Raymond has an idea. They'll advertise a midnight show featuring Mademoiselle Fifi, "the hottest little cooch artist in the world." When Fowler shows up with the cops, Fifi will be Rachel doing her Bible dances. Fowler will be a laughing stock and Minsky's will be saved.

Now forget all that. What's important is the sweet nature of this burlesque gift. Most of the movie takes place backstage, on stage and in a near-by deli. It's a great, true deli, where we have bowls of half sours on the table and plenty of chunks of rye bread. (In that deli we'll watch Raymond nearly sweet talk a good looking woman at the next table into his bed, and then sweet talk her husband, who suddenly appears, into agreeing Raymond just gave them both a great compliment. Robards is as smooth as warm chicken fat.)

Backstage is packed with sets, lights and half dressed chorus girls, but it's on stage where the goods are delivered...chorus girls who can barely dance but can jiggle with vigor and bump with oomph. Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom do wonderful work together. Robards is the wise-guy straight man to Wisdom's eternally innocent optimist. Their song and dance numbers really work. We'd expect this of Wisdom, who got started in English music halls and became one of Britain's great clowns. Robards, who was one of America's great stage actors, is almost as skilled. Their "Perfect Gentleman" number by rights should be a remembered classic. I don't know how Friedkin managed it, but the people in the audience look authentic, right down to their delighted reactions.

The Night They Raided Minsky's also has a clever script. Says Raymond to Chick when the little guy wants some reassurance after meeting Rachel. "You met a girl!" says Raymond with a big smile. "Ah, Chick, my boy, when it comes to girls you have three qualities that are far worse than being short and funny looking. You have the curse of the three D's. You are decent, devoted and dependable...good qualities in a dog, disastrous in a man!"

Charles Strouse scored the movie and, with Lee Adams, provided great songs. "The Night They Raided Minsky's," "Take Ten Terrific Girls" and "Perfect Gentleman" establish more than anything else the good-natured, fast, harmlessly bawdy style of the movie. The Night They Raided Minsky's had a troubled parentage, with director William Friedkin disliking it and film editor Ralph Rosenblum claiming credit for everything good about it. There's more jump cutting than we need and perhaps a few too many historical clips. Still, we have potent nostalgia for things past that no one now is alive to remember. The movie carries Norman Lear's imprint at his best, and if Rosenblum and Friedkin want to arm wrestle over the movie, that's all right with me. Who cares who cut the paper lace for the valentine? I'm just happy we've got it.

I'm ready for Dexter Maitland as the tenor to see us home...

"I have a secret recipe / Concocted with much skill / And once you've tried my special dish / You'll never get your fill...

"Take ten terrific girls, but only nine costumes, and you're cooking up something grand.

"Then add some funny men / And pepper with laughter./ It's hot and tasty I know.

"Then serve it piping hot and what have you got... A burlesque show!"

And I mean that most sincerely, this is one of the great films of the 1960s, charting the last days of the burlesque music-hall theatricals in America. The plot of the film is something of a mish-mash, mixing up Britt Ekland as an Amish runaway who finds herself onstage, with Denholm Elliot as a moralistic do-gooder trying to close down Minsky's theatre, but in truth, as with a large number of films of the period (see also The Pink Panther films), the plot is merely a convenience, a washing line upon which to hang a large number of characters, theatrical set-pieces and little illustrations of life in and around the theatrical world. A host of fine actors grace the screen, with Elliot Gould making an early appearance as Minsky jr, Harry Andrews as Ekland's glowering father, Joseph Wiseman as Minsky sr and most affectingly, Bert Lahr in his final screen performance. Even Ekland is OK, and it takes a lot to say that. But at the centre of it all are Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom as the theatre's chief comedy double-act. An odd pairing that works amazingly well, with Robards an effectively sleezy straight man (his seduction of Ekland is both funny and stomach churning). But if Robards is good, Wisdsom is fantastic, his comedic skills honed in England finally being given full rein (I enjoy a lot of his British films, but few of them really allow him full use of his abilities), and the song and dance routine and when he defines burlesque to Ekland rank as his finest on-screen moments. it's a bitter shame that the failure of this film and personal circumstances forced him to leave Hollywood, because with the right material he could have gone so much further. Truth is, if you have no sympathy for this sort of material, this will not change your mind. But for an utterly unique film, packed with beautiful little minutiae of theatrical life and a great mix of dark humour and bawdy comedy, this is really something to be cherished.