The Night They Raided Minsky's
Encyclopedia
The Night They Raided Minsky's is a 1968 musical comedy film directed by William Friedkin
and produced by Norman Lear
. It is a fictional account of the invention of the striptease
at Minsky's Burlesque
in 1925. The film is based on the novel by Rowland Barber, published in 1960.
), an innocent Amish
girl from rural Pennsylvania, arrives in New York's Lower East Side, hoping to make it as a dancer. Rachel's dances are based on Bible stories. She auditions at Minsky's Burlesque
, but her dances are much too dull (and chaste) for the bawdy show. But then Billy Minsky (Elliott Gould
) and the show's jaded straight man, Raymond Paine (Jason Robards
), concoct a plan to foil moral crusader Vance Fowler (Denholm Elliott
), who is intent on shutting down the theater. Minsky publicizes Rachel as the notorious Madamoiselle Fifi, performing the "dance that drove a million Frenchmen wild." This will invite a raid by Fowler and the police. But they will let Rachel perform her innocuous Bible dances, thus humiliating Fowler.
During the run-up to her midnight performance, Raymond and his partner, Chick (Norman Wisdom
), show Rachel the ropes of burlesque, and they both fall for her in the process. Meanwhile, Rachel's stern father (Harry Andrews
), who even objects to her Bible dances, arrives in search of his daughter. The film climaxes when Rachel takes the stage after her father has called her a whore and she realizes that the Minskys are just using her. Her father tries to drag her off-stage, but she pulls away and accidentally tears a slit in her dress. The sold-out crowd spurs her on and Rachel begins to enjoy her power over the audience and starts to strip. But when she looks into the wings and sees Raymond leaving the theater for good, she calls and throws out her arms to him, inadvertently dropping the front of her dress and baring her breasts. Fowler blows his whistle and the police rush the stage and close down the show. A madcap fight sequence follows. In the end, most of the cast members are carted off to the paddy wagon, including Rachel's mystified father.
The Minskys were raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absent-mindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings. When the crowd cheered, Dix returned to the stage to continue removing her clothing to wild applause. Billy Minsky ordered the "accident" repeated every night. This began an endless cycle; to keep their license, the Minskys had to keep their shows clean, but to keep drawing customers they had to be risqué — whenever they went too far, they were raided.
According to Morton Minsky, Mademoiselle Fifi was actually a woman named Mary Dawson from Pennsylvania
. Her father was a policeman and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid to shut down one of the Minsky burlesque houses. Furthermore, Dawson was not a stripper; she was an "exotic" dancer who never showed any forbidden parts of her body — until that night.
Morton Minsky suggests that Billy persuaded Dawson to expose her breasts in order to create a sensation. By 1925 it was permissible for girls in legitimate shows staged by Ziegfeld, George White
and Earl Carroll
— as well as burlesque — to appear topless as long as they didn't move (as a "living tableau"). Madamoiselle Fifi stripped to the waist, but then moved, triggering the raid. "Although the show in general had been tame," he wrote, "Fifi's finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be opened [Minsky] theater uptown [on 42nd Street
]."
originally announced that production would start in the fall of 1966. However, filming didn't begin until a year later, early in October 1967. It was filmed at Chelsea Studios
in New York City
.
On May 23, 1967, the Los Angeles Times reported that William Friedkin
was set to direct. Friedkin's first film, Good Times
(1967), starring Sonny and Cher, had just been released. A musical comedy which spoofs various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns and spy thrillers, it was a critical and box office flop. Minsky's
did get Freidkin noticed; while he made a musical comedy, he also indulged into a theme central to his later film, that of amorality, sinister forces, crime and evil reigning supreme around the American landscape. Later, he would hit on this theme again in other films like The Boys In The Band
, The French Connection
, and The Exorcist
.
Tony Curtis
was announced for the Minsky's cast in June 1967, likely as Raymond Paine, but dropped out in September over concerns with the revised script. Jason Robards was announced in the Paine role about a month before filming began. (Raymond Paine was the name of a real burlesque straight man who appeared in the Minsky show that night. He was killed in a hit and run accident in 1934.) In August 1967, Alan Alda
was announced for a role in the film, probably as the young Billy Minsky. However, Alda was appearing on Broadway and was unable to leave his role in "The Apple Tree." Elliott Gould
, who was then married to Barbra Streisand
, was signed and made his film debut.
British comedian Norman Wisdom
had made a series of low-budget star-vehicle comedies for the Rank Organisation, beginning with Trouble in Store in 1953. The film earned him a BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Film in 1954. Never highly thought of by the critics, they were very popular with domestic audiences and Wisdom's films outsold Sean Connery's James Bond
features from 1955 through till 1966. That year, Wisdom moved to New York to star on Broadway in the James Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn musical comedy Walking Happy. His highly-acclaimed performance was nominated for a Tony Award. The Night They Raided Minsky's was his first American film, and he received good notices. Variety wrote: "So easily does Wisdom dominate his many scenes, other cast members suffer by comparison", and Time compared him to America's comedic Old Guard: "Wisdom recalls Keaton in his split-second spills and deadpan pantomime."
The Night They Raided Minsky's was the first musical shot entirely on location in New York. The budget exceeded $3 million, making it the most expensive film shot in the city up until that time. A block of East 26th Street between First and Second Avenues was transformed into the Lower East Side circa 1925. (The vacant tenements on the block were scheduled to be torn down as part of an urban renewal project; the city postponed demolition for the filmmakers.) A portion of an elevated train station 30 feet tall and 56 feet long was built. Exteriors were shot there for two weeks.
This film proved to be actor Bert Lahr
's last. Although up in age, he still wanted to work; best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz
, Lahr was a burlesque veteran. On November 21, however, Lahr was hospitalized for a back ailment. In Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr, John Lahr wrote: "Bert Lahr died in the early morning of December 4, 1967. Two weeks before, he had returned home at 2 a.m., chilled and feverish, from the damp studio where The Night They Raided Minsky's was being filmed. Ordinarily, a man of his age and reputation would not have had to perform that late into the night, but he had waived that proviso in his contract because of his trust in the producer and his need to work. The newspapers reported the cause of death as pneumonia; but he succumbed to cancer, a disease he feared but never knew he had."
Most of Lahr's scenes had been shot. Norman Lear told the New York Times that "through judicious editing we will be able to shoot the rest of the film so that his wonderful performance will remain intact." The producers used a double, burlesque legend Joey Faye, to fill in for Lahr.
Filming was scheduled to wrap on December 22, 1967. The movie was released exactly a year later, on December 22, 1968.
Rosenblum wrote, "I had taken Minsky's on not because I believed it would be a great editorial challenge but because I saw it as a lark. I had just come off six months on The Producers
, a trying experience that pickled my nerve endings, and I badly needed a soothing job...The script revealed a frothy, unimportant film full of musical numbers, the kind of thing that might be snapped into shape in six to eight weeks of editing. I loved cutting musicals; I expected a short stretch of mindless fun."
It took him over nine months to cut the film.
He wrote: "From the very beginning, the idea behind The Night They Raided Minsky's had been to create an 'old-fashioned musical with a New Look'...although what it was and how it was going to be accomplished no one knew...Had anyone dared to acknowledge that the New Look we hoped to achieve in Minsky's was essentially a [Richard] Lester
look, we all might have been saved some anguish; but such an acknowledgement would have been considered inappropriate, if not blasphemous, and so it barely crossed our minds."
Rosenblum called the screening of his first cut with Friedkin and Lear "disastrous." "The chief drawback of Minsky's dramatic episodes was their predictability," Rosenblum wrote. "The script had aimed for an old-fashioned charm, but, with a few important exceptions, no new twist of sophistication was added to please a modern audience." When the cut was screened for David Picker, an executive VP of United Artists, he called it "the worst first cut I've ever seen." However, since there was no release date set for the film, Picker told Lear and Rosenblum, "Whatever you want to do, go ahead, take your time, and do it."
Drawing on his background editing documentaries, Rosenblum turned to the huge stock film libraries in New York and began selecting clips from the 1920s. By arduous trial and error, this footage was used not only to evoke a sense of time and place, but also to comment on and enhance scenes in the film. Rosenblum created montages of this material and Friedkin's footage, often marrying vintage footage with new by transitioning from black and white into color. The effect, Rosenblum wrote, was "magical".
While Rosenblum worked over the cut throughout most of 1968, Lear was developing other projects, including one that would become the TV series All in the Family
; Friedkin, meanwhile, was in England, directing the film adaptation
of Harold Pinter
's The Birthday Party
. Not long after he saw the first cut of Minsky's, Friedkin was interviewed on British TV, and called Minsky's "the biggest piece of crap I'd ever worked on". According to Rosenblum, "I'd heard that [Friedkin] would be barred from screenings [of Minsky's] because of his talk show blunder and would have to pay to get in."
Eventually, The Night They Raided Minsky's was remade in the cutting room. "Above all, this emerging Minsky's was highly contemporary," Rosenblum wrote. "One might even conclude it had a New Look. The obvious fact that had eluded us from the beginning suddenly struck me now: The avant-garde quality Richard Lester had achieved in films like Help! could only be accomplished through editing. From the moment the Search for the New Look began, Minsky's was destined to be a cutting-room picture."
Rosenblum claimed that there are 1,440 cuts in the film; by comparison, Annie Hall
, a film of the same length, has only 382.
Of course, most of the credit went to Friedkin, who, according to Rosenblum, "may not have even seen the film". Friedkin later admitted to having "no vision" for Minsky's and instead borrowed from Rouben Mamoulian
's film Applause
(1929), an early talkie about burlesque notable for its innovative camera work.
wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times
, "'The Night They Raided Minsky's'" is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick
extravaganza, but it isn't. It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in Gypsy
) and it really seems to understand this most-American art form."
New York Times critic Renata Adler wrote, in part, "The nicest thing about the movie, which is a little broad in plot and long in spots, is its denseness and care in detail: The little ugly cough that comes from one room of a shoddy hotel; the thoughtfully worked out, poorly danced vaudeville routines; the beautifully timed, and genuinely funny, gags. 'I hear the man say impossible,' a man on the stage says when the man here hasn't said a word. And the vaudeville [sic] routines of innocence forever victimized, for an audience of fall guys, works pretty much as it must have worked in its time." (12/23/68)
Time called the film "a valedictory valentine to oldtime burlesque. In legend, the girls were glamorous, and every baggy-pants buffoon was a second W. C. Fields
. In truth, the institution was as coarse as its audiences. Minsky's mixes both fact and fancy in a surprisingly successful musical...Minsky's was 58 days in the shooting and ten months in the editing—and shows it. Marred by grainy film and fleshed out with documentary and pseudo-newsreel footage of the '20s, the film spends too much time on pickles, pushcarts and passersby. But it compensates with a fond, nostalgic score, a bumping, grinding chorus line and a series of closeups of the late Bert Lahr
, who plays a retired burlesque comedian. Like Lahr, the film offers an engaging blend of mockery and melancholy."
According to an interview in the Manchester Evening News (10/22/07), The Night They Raided Minsky's is Britt Ekland's favorite film. Ekland divorced Peter Sellers
four days before the film was released. They were married in 1965 and have a daughter, Victoria Sellers
, born the same year. Ekland was quoted on the web site whatsonstage.com http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821115736901 "I loved William Friedkin who directed me in the film The Night They Raided Minky’s because he was very specific and honest and young. He got the performance out of me which he knew I had in me. Many years later he directed The Exorcist
and he wanted to test my daughter for it, but he warned me if she did that film she’d be changed forever, so I said no way, I wouldn’t allow her to test. She was furious with me about that. I think it took her a while to forgive me."
, titled Minsky's, opened officially on February 6, 2009 at the Ahmanson Theatre
, Los Angeles, and ran through March 1, 2009. The new musical was directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw
, with a book by Bob Martin
and music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Susan Birkenhead
. Though the show's program notes that it is based on the film, the book is essentially a new story.
on May 20, 2008 in wide-screen and full screen versions.
William Friedkin
William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director...
and produced by Norman Lear
Norman Lear
Norman Milton Lear is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude...
. It is a fictional account of the invention of the striptease
Striptease
A striptease is an erotic or exotic dance in which the performer gradually undresses, either partly or completely, in a seductive and sexually suggestive manner...
at Minsky's Burlesque
Minsky's Burlesque
Minsky's Burlesque refers to the brand of American burlesque presented by four sons of Louis and Ethel Minksy: Abraham 'Abe' Bennett Minsky , Michael William 'Billy' Minsky , Herbert Kay Minsky , and Morton Minsky . They started in 1912 and ended in 1937 in New York City...
in 1925. The film is based on the novel by Rowland Barber, published in 1960.
Plot
Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt EklandBritt Ekland
Britt-Marie Ekland is a Swedish actress and singer, and a long time resident of the United Kingdom. She is best known for her roles as a Bond girl in The Man with the Golden Gun, and in the British cult horror film The Wicker Man, as well as her marriage to actor Peter Sellers, and her...
), an innocent Amish
Amish
The Amish , sometimes referred to as Amish Mennonites, are a group of Christian church fellowships that form a subgroup of the Mennonite churches...
girl from rural Pennsylvania, arrives in New York's Lower East Side, hoping to make it as a dancer. Rachel's dances are based on Bible stories. She auditions at Minsky's Burlesque
Minsky's Burlesque
Minsky's Burlesque refers to the brand of American burlesque presented by four sons of Louis and Ethel Minksy: Abraham 'Abe' Bennett Minsky , Michael William 'Billy' Minsky , Herbert Kay Minsky , and Morton Minsky . They started in 1912 and ended in 1937 in New York City...
, but her dances are much too dull (and chaste) for the bawdy show. But then Billy Minsky (Elliott Gould
Elliott Gould
Elliott Gould is an American actor. He began acting in Hollywood films during the 1960s, and has remained prolific ever since. Some of his most notable films include M*A*S*H and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, for which he received an Oscar nomination...
) and the show's jaded straight man, Raymond Paine (Jason Robards
Jason Robards
Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. was an American actor on stage, and in film and television, and a winner of the Tony Award , two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award...
), concoct a plan to foil moral crusader Vance Fowler (Denholm Elliott
Denholm Elliott
Denholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE was an English film, television and theatre actor with over 120 film and television credits...
), who is intent on shutting down the theater. Minsky publicizes Rachel as the notorious Madamoiselle Fifi, performing the "dance that drove a million Frenchmen wild." This will invite a raid by Fowler and the police. But they will let Rachel perform her innocuous Bible dances, thus humiliating Fowler.
During the run-up to her midnight performance, Raymond and his partner, Chick (Norman Wisdom
Norman Wisdom
Sir Norman Joseph Wisdom, OBE was an English actor, comedian and singer-songwriter best known for a series of comedy films produced between 1953 and 1966 featuring his hapless onscreen character Norman Pitkin...
), show Rachel the ropes of burlesque, and they both fall for her in the process. Meanwhile, Rachel's stern father (Harry Andrews
Harry Andrews
Harry Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English film actor known for his frequent portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the 1965 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the...
), who even objects to her Bible dances, arrives in search of his daughter. The film climaxes when Rachel takes the stage after her father has called her a whore and she realizes that the Minskys are just using her. Her father tries to drag her off-stage, but she pulls away and accidentally tears a slit in her dress. The sold-out crowd spurs her on and Rachel begins to enjoy her power over the audience and starts to strip. But when she looks into the wings and sees Raymond leaving the theater for good, she calls and throws out her arms to him, inadvertently dropping the front of her dress and baring her breasts. Fowler blows his whistle and the police rush the stage and close down the show. A madcap fight sequence follows. In the end, most of the cast members are carted off to the paddy wagon, including Rachel's mystified father.
Cast
- Jason RobardsJason RobardsJason Nelson Robards, Jr. was an American actor on stage, and in film and television, and a winner of the Tony Award , two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award...
as Raymond Paine - Britt EklandBritt EklandBritt-Marie Ekland is a Swedish actress and singer, and a long time resident of the United Kingdom. She is best known for her roles as a Bond girl in The Man with the Golden Gun, and in the British cult horror film The Wicker Man, as well as her marriage to actor Peter Sellers, and her...
as Rachel Elizabeth Schpitendavel - Norman WisdomNorman WisdomSir Norman Joseph Wisdom, OBE was an English actor, comedian and singer-songwriter best known for a series of comedy films produced between 1953 and 1966 featuring his hapless onscreen character Norman Pitkin...
as Chick Williams - Forrest TuckerForrest TuckerForrest Tucker was an American actor in both movies and television from the 1940s to the 1980s. Tucker, who stood 190 cm tall and weighed 93 kg , appeared in nearly 100 action films in the 1940s and 1950s.-Early life:Forrest Meredith Tucker was born in Plainfield, Indiana, a son of...
as Trim Houlihan - Harry AndrewsHarry AndrewsHarry Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English film actor known for his frequent portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the 1965 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the...
as Jacob Schpitendavel - Joseph WisemanJoseph WisemanJoseph Wiseman was a Canadian theater and film actor, best known for starring as the titular antagonist of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, his role as Manny Weisbord on Crime Story, and his career on Broadway...
as Louis Minsky - Denholm ElliottDenholm ElliottDenholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE was an English film, television and theatre actor with over 120 film and television credits...
as Vance Fowler - Elliott GouldElliott GouldElliott Gould is an American actor. He began acting in Hollywood films during the 1960s, and has remained prolific ever since. Some of his most notable films include M*A*S*H and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, for which he received an Oscar nomination...
as Billy Minsky - Jack BurnsJack BurnsJack Burns is an American comedian and voice actor.-Biography:In 1959, he began his career as a comedy team with George Carlin when both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas...
as Candy Butcher - Bert LahrBert LahrBert Lahr was an American actor and comedian. Lahr is remembered today for his roles as the Cowardly Lion and Kansas farmworker Zeke in The Wizard of Oz, but was also well-known for work in burlesque, vaudeville, and on Broadway.-Early life:Lahr was born in New York City, of German-Jewish heritage...
as Professor Spats
Background
In his book, Minsky's Burlesque, Morton Minsky (with Milt Machlin) wrote, "As for April 20, 1925, the day that the raid on which the book was based took place, it was hardly epochal in the history of burlesque, but it did turn out to be a prelude to much greater troubles... Anyway, the raid story was fun, but the raid itself was simply one of dozens to which we had become accustomed; certainly no big crisis."The Minskys were raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absent-mindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings. When the crowd cheered, Dix returned to the stage to continue removing her clothing to wild applause. Billy Minsky ordered the "accident" repeated every night. This began an endless cycle; to keep their license, the Minskys had to keep their shows clean, but to keep drawing customers they had to be risqué — whenever they went too far, they were raided.
According to Morton Minsky, Mademoiselle Fifi was actually a woman named Mary Dawson from Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
. Her father was a policeman and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid to shut down one of the Minsky burlesque houses. Furthermore, Dawson was not a stripper; she was an "exotic" dancer who never showed any forbidden parts of her body — until that night.
Morton Minsky suggests that Billy persuaded Dawson to expose her breasts in order to create a sensation. By 1925 it was permissible for girls in legitimate shows staged by Ziegfeld, George White
George White's Scandals
George White's Scandals were a long-running string of Broadway revues produced by George White that ran from 1919–1939, modelled after the Ziegfeld Follies. The "Scandals" launched the careers of many entertainers, including W.C. Fields, the Three Stooges, Ray Bolger, Helen Morgan, Ethel Merman, ...
and Earl Carroll
Earl Carroll
Earl Carroll was an American theatrical producer, director, songwriter and composer born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.-Career:...
— as well as burlesque — to appear topless as long as they didn't move (as a "living tableau"). Madamoiselle Fifi stripped to the waist, but then moved, triggering the raid. "Although the show in general had been tame," he wrote, "Fifi's finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be opened [Minsky] theater uptown [on 42nd Street
42nd Street
42nd Street may refer to:*42nd Street *42nd Street **"Forty-Second Street", title song from the film*42nd Street -New York City Subway:...
]."
Pre-production
Norman LearNorman Lear
Norman Milton Lear is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude...
originally announced that production would start in the fall of 1966. However, filming didn't begin until a year later, early in October 1967. It was filmed at Chelsea Studios
Chelsea Studios
Chelsea Studios is a television studio and sound stage at 221 West 26th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.-History:The building was originally an armory that was home to Ninth Mounted Calvary which moved to 14th Street in 1914....
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
On May 23, 1967, the Los Angeles Times reported that William Friedkin
William Friedkin
William Friedkin is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director...
was set to direct. Friedkin's first film, Good Times
Good Times (film)
Good Times is a 1967 musical comedy film starring Sonny and Cher.-Synopsis:Sonny and Cher appear as themselves in this spoof of various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns and spy thrillers. The plot revolves around a movie contract offered to Sonny by powerful executive Mr. Mordicus,...
(1967), starring Sonny and Cher, had just been released. A musical comedy which spoofs various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns and spy thrillers, it was a critical and box office flop. Minsky's
Minsky's
Minsky's is a musical by Bob Martin , Charles Strouse , and Susan Birkenhead , and is loosely based on the 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky's....
did get Freidkin noticed; while he made a musical comedy, he also indulged into a theme central to his later film, that of amorality, sinister forces, crime and evil reigning supreme around the American landscape. Later, he would hit on this theme again in other films like The Boys In The Band
The Boys in the Band
The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin. The screenplay by Mart Crowley is based on his Off Broadway play of the same title, Crowley penned a sequel to the play years later entitled The Men From The Boys...
, The French Connection
The French Connection
The French Connection or French Connection may refer to:* French Connection, an infamous 1960s-70s drug trafficking scheme* The French Connection , a 1969 non-fiction book about the drug trafficking scheme...
, and The Exorcist
The Exorcist (film)
The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film directed by William Friedkin, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty and based on the exorcism case of Robbie Mannheim, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her...
.
Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis was an American film actor whose career spanned six decades, but had his greatest popularity during the 1950s and early 1960s. He acted in over 100 films in roles covering a wide range of genres, from light comedy to serious drama...
was announced for the Minsky's cast in June 1967, likely as Raymond Paine, but dropped out in September over concerns with the revised script. Jason Robards was announced in the Paine role about a month before filming began. (Raymond Paine was the name of a real burlesque straight man who appeared in the Minsky show that night. He was killed in a hit and run accident in 1934.) In August 1967, Alan Alda
Alan Alda
Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo , better known as Alan Alda, is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series M*A*S*H...
was announced for a role in the film, probably as the young Billy Minsky. However, Alda was appearing on Broadway and was unable to leave his role in "The Apple Tree." Elliott Gould
Elliott Gould
Elliott Gould is an American actor. He began acting in Hollywood films during the 1960s, and has remained prolific ever since. Some of his most notable films include M*A*S*H and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, for which he received an Oscar nomination...
, who was then married to Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand is an American singer, actress, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy,...
, was signed and made his film debut.
British comedian Norman Wisdom
Norman Wisdom
Sir Norman Joseph Wisdom, OBE was an English actor, comedian and singer-songwriter best known for a series of comedy films produced between 1953 and 1966 featuring his hapless onscreen character Norman Pitkin...
had made a series of low-budget star-vehicle comedies for the Rank Organisation, beginning with Trouble in Store in 1953. The film earned him a BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Film in 1954. Never highly thought of by the critics, they were very popular with domestic audiences and Wisdom's films outsold Sean Connery's James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
features from 1955 through till 1966. That year, Wisdom moved to New York to star on Broadway in the James Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn musical comedy Walking Happy. His highly-acclaimed performance was nominated for a Tony Award. The Night They Raided Minsky's was his first American film, and he received good notices. Variety wrote: "So easily does Wisdom dominate his many scenes, other cast members suffer by comparison", and Time compared him to America's comedic Old Guard: "Wisdom recalls Keaton in his split-second spills and deadpan pantomime."
The Night They Raided Minsky's was the first musical shot entirely on location in New York. The budget exceeded $3 million, making it the most expensive film shot in the city up until that time. A block of East 26th Street between First and Second Avenues was transformed into the Lower East Side circa 1925. (The vacant tenements on the block were scheduled to be torn down as part of an urban renewal project; the city postponed demolition for the filmmakers.) A portion of an elevated train station 30 feet tall and 56 feet long was built. Exteriors were shot there for two weeks.
This film proved to be actor Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr was an American actor and comedian. Lahr is remembered today for his roles as the Cowardly Lion and Kansas farmworker Zeke in The Wizard of Oz, but was also well-known for work in burlesque, vaudeville, and on Broadway.-Early life:Lahr was born in New York City, of German-Jewish heritage...
's last. Although up in age, he still wanted to work; best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...
, Lahr was a burlesque veteran. On November 21, however, Lahr was hospitalized for a back ailment. In Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr, John Lahr wrote: "Bert Lahr died in the early morning of December 4, 1967. Two weeks before, he had returned home at 2 a.m., chilled and feverish, from the damp studio where The Night They Raided Minsky's was being filmed. Ordinarily, a man of his age and reputation would not have had to perform that late into the night, but he had waived that proviso in his contract because of his trust in the producer and his need to work. The newspapers reported the cause of death as pneumonia; but he succumbed to cancer, a disease he feared but never knew he had."
Most of Lahr's scenes had been shot. Norman Lear told the New York Times that "through judicious editing we will be able to shoot the rest of the film so that his wonderful performance will remain intact." The producers used a double, burlesque legend Joey Faye, to fill in for Lahr.
Filming was scheduled to wrap on December 22, 1967. The movie was released exactly a year later, on December 22, 1968.
Post-production
Film editor Ralph Rosenblum documented his experience on The Night They Raided Minsky's in his book (with Robert Karen), When the Shooting Stops...The Cutting Begins (ISBN 0-670-75991-0).Rosenblum wrote, "I had taken Minsky's on not because I believed it would be a great editorial challenge but because I saw it as a lark. I had just come off six months on The Producers
The Producers (1968 film)
The Producers is a 1968 American satirical dark comedy cult classic film written and directed by Mel Brooks. The film is set in the late 1960s and it tells the story of a theatrical producer and an accountant who want to produce a sure-fire Broadway flop...
, a trying experience that pickled my nerve endings, and I badly needed a soothing job...The script revealed a frothy, unimportant film full of musical numbers, the kind of thing that might be snapped into shape in six to eight weeks of editing. I loved cutting musicals; I expected a short stretch of mindless fun."
It took him over nine months to cut the film.
He wrote: "From the very beginning, the idea behind The Night They Raided Minsky's had been to create an 'old-fashioned musical with a New Look'...although what it was and how it was going to be accomplished no one knew...Had anyone dared to acknowledge that the New Look we hoped to achieve in Minsky's was essentially a [Richard] Lester
Richard Lester
Richard Lester is an American film director based in Britain. Lester is notable for his work with The Beatles in the 1960s and his work on the Superman film series in the 1980s.-Early years and television:...
look, we all might have been saved some anguish; but such an acknowledgement would have been considered inappropriate, if not blasphemous, and so it barely crossed our minds."
Rosenblum called the screening of his first cut with Friedkin and Lear "disastrous." "The chief drawback of Minsky's dramatic episodes was their predictability," Rosenblum wrote. "The script had aimed for an old-fashioned charm, but, with a few important exceptions, no new twist of sophistication was added to please a modern audience." When the cut was screened for David Picker, an executive VP of United Artists, he called it "the worst first cut I've ever seen." However, since there was no release date set for the film, Picker told Lear and Rosenblum, "Whatever you want to do, go ahead, take your time, and do it."
Drawing on his background editing documentaries, Rosenblum turned to the huge stock film libraries in New York and began selecting clips from the 1920s. By arduous trial and error, this footage was used not only to evoke a sense of time and place, but also to comment on and enhance scenes in the film. Rosenblum created montages of this material and Friedkin's footage, often marrying vintage footage with new by transitioning from black and white into color. The effect, Rosenblum wrote, was "magical".
While Rosenblum worked over the cut throughout most of 1968, Lear was developing other projects, including one that would become the TV series All in the Family
All in the Family
All in the Family is an American sitcom that was originally broadcast on the CBS television network from January 12, 1971, to April 8, 1979. In September 1979, a new show, Archie Bunker's Place, picked up where All in the Family had ended...
; Friedkin, meanwhile, was in England, directing the film adaptation
The Birthday Party (film)
The Birthday Party is a 1968 British drama film directed by William Friedkin, based on an unpublished screenplay by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, which he adapted from his own play The Birthday Party, considered an example of Pinter's "comedy of menace".-Plot:The protagonist is a lodger in his...
of Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
's The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party (play)
The Birthday Party is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays...
. Not long after he saw the first cut of Minsky's, Friedkin was interviewed on British TV, and called Minsky's "the biggest piece of crap I'd ever worked on". According to Rosenblum, "I'd heard that [Friedkin] would be barred from screenings [of Minsky's] because of his talk show blunder and would have to pay to get in."
Eventually, The Night They Raided Minsky's was remade in the cutting room. "Above all, this emerging Minsky's was highly contemporary," Rosenblum wrote. "One might even conclude it had a New Look. The obvious fact that had eluded us from the beginning suddenly struck me now: The avant-garde quality Richard Lester had achieved in films like Help! could only be accomplished through editing. From the moment the Search for the New Look began, Minsky's was destined to be a cutting-room picture."
Rosenblum claimed that there are 1,440 cuts in the film; by comparison, Annie Hall
Annie Hall
Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay co-written with Marshall Brickman and co-starring Diane Keaton. One of Allen's most popular and most honored films, it won four Academy Awards including Best Picture...
, a film of the same length, has only 382.
Of course, most of the credit went to Friedkin, who, according to Rosenblum, "may not have even seen the film". Friedkin later admitted to having "no vision" for Minsky's and instead borrowed from Rouben Mamoulian
Rouben Mamoulian
Rouben Mamoulian was an Armenian-American film and theatre director.-Biography:Born in Tbilisi, Georgia to an Armenian family, Rouben relocated to England and started directing plays in London in 1922...
's film Applause
Applause (film)
Applause is a 1929 black-and-white backstage musical film, shot during the early years of sound films. It is very notable as one of the few films of its time to break free from the restrictions of sound technology. Based on a novel by Beth Brown, the film was staged and directed by Rouben...
(1929), an early talkie about burlesque notable for its innovative camera work.
Reception
The film received good reviews for its tribute to old time burlesque. Roger EbertRoger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
, "'The Night They Raided Minsky's'" is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick
Slapstick
Slapstick is a type of comedy involving exaggerated violence and activities which may exceed the boundaries of common sense.- Origins :The phrase comes from the batacchio or bataccio — called the 'slap stick' in English — a club-like object composed of two wooden slats used in Commedia dell'arte...
extravaganza, but it isn't. It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in Gypsy
Gypsy (1962 film)
Gypsy is a 1962 American musical film produced and directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The screenplay by Leonard Spigelgass is based on the book of the 1959 stage musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable by Arthur Laurents, which was adapted from Gypsy: A Memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee.Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics for...
) and it really seems to understand this most-American art form."
New York Times critic Renata Adler wrote, in part, "The nicest thing about the movie, which is a little broad in plot and long in spots, is its denseness and care in detail: The little ugly cough that comes from one room of a shoddy hotel; the thoughtfully worked out, poorly danced vaudeville routines; the beautifully timed, and genuinely funny, gags. 'I hear the man say impossible,' a man on the stage says when the man here hasn't said a word. And the vaudeville [sic] routines of innocence forever victimized, for an audience of fall guys, works pretty much as it must have worked in its time." (12/23/68)
Time called the film "a valedictory valentine to oldtime burlesque. In legend, the girls were glamorous, and every baggy-pants buffoon was a second W. C. Fields
W. C. Fields
William Claude Dukenfield , better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer...
. In truth, the institution was as coarse as its audiences. Minsky's mixes both fact and fancy in a surprisingly successful musical...Minsky's was 58 days in the shooting and ten months in the editing—and shows it. Marred by grainy film and fleshed out with documentary and pseudo-newsreel footage of the '20s, the film spends too much time on pickles, pushcarts and passersby. But it compensates with a fond, nostalgic score, a bumping, grinding chorus line and a series of closeups of the late Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr was an American actor and comedian. Lahr is remembered today for his roles as the Cowardly Lion and Kansas farmworker Zeke in The Wizard of Oz, but was also well-known for work in burlesque, vaudeville, and on Broadway.-Early life:Lahr was born in New York City, of German-Jewish heritage...
, who plays a retired burlesque comedian. Like Lahr, the film offers an engaging blend of mockery and melancholy."
According to an interview in the Manchester Evening News (10/22/07), The Night They Raided Minsky's is Britt Ekland's favorite film. Ekland divorced Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...
four days before the film was released. They were married in 1965 and have a daughter, Victoria Sellers
Victoria Sellers
Victoria Sellers is an English model, actress, comedienne, and jewelry designer.-Early life:Sellers attended Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles in West Los Angeles, a private school run by French immigrants that now has a number of campuses...
, born the same year. Ekland was quoted on the web site whatsonstage.com http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821115736901 "I loved William Friedkin who directed me in the film The Night They Raided Minky’s because he was very specific and honest and young. He got the performance out of me which he knew I had in me. Many years later he directed The Exorcist
The Exorcist (film)
The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film directed by William Friedkin, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty and based on the exorcism case of Robbie Mannheim, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her...
and he wanted to test my daughter for it, but he warned me if she did that film she’d be changed forever, so I said no way, I wouldn’t allow her to test. She was furious with me about that. I think it took her a while to forgive me."
Stage adaptation
A stage adaptation as a musicalMusical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...
, titled Minsky's, opened officially on February 6, 2009 at the Ahmanson Theatre
Ahmanson Theatre
The Ahmanson Theatre is one of the four main venues that comprise the Los Angeles Music Center.Through the generosity of philanthropist Robert H. Ahmanson, construction began on March 9, 1962. The theatre opened on April 12, 1967 with a production of More Stately Mansions starring Ingrid Bergman,...
, Los Angeles, and ran through March 1, 2009. The new musical was directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw
Casey Nicholaw
Casey Nicholaw is an American theatre director, choreographer and performer. He has been nominated for Tony Awards for directing and choreographing The Drowsy Chaperone , for choreographing Monty Python's Spamalot , and choreographing The Book of Mormon , as well as winning for his co-direction...
, with a book by Bob Martin
Bob Martin
Bob Martin may refer to:People:* Bob Martin , Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly* Bob Martin American basketball player* Bob Martin...
and music and lyrics by Charles Strouse and Susan Birkenhead
Susan Birkenhead
Susan Birkenhead is an American lyricist.Birkenhead made her Broadway debut as one of a team of songwriters contributing to Working , for which she received her first Tony Award nomination. Her second was earned for Jelly's Last Jam , which won her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics and a...
. Though the show's program notes that it is based on the film, the book is essentially a new story.
Home media
The film was released on DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
on May 20, 2008 in wide-screen and full screen versions.