The Night They Raided Minsky's
The Night They Raided Minsky's is a 1968 American musical comedy film written and produced by Norman Lear, with music and lyrics by the duo of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, and directed by William Friedkin. Based on a 1960 novel by Rowland Barber, the film is a fictional account of the invention of the striptease at Minsky's Burlesque in 1925. It stars Jason Robards, Britt Ekland, Norman Wisdom, Forrest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Elliott Gould and Bert Lahr.
The film was released by United Artists on December 18, 1968, to generally positive reviews. It was a financial success and later spawned a stage musical adaptation, Minsky's, in 2009.
Plot
In 1925 Rachel Schpitendavel, 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 Billy Minsky and the show's jaded straight man, Raymond Paine, concoct a plan to use Rachel to foil moral crusader Vance Fowler, 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", hoping it will prompt a raid by Fowler and the police. Instead, Billy would let Rachel perform her innocuous Bible dances, thus humiliating Fowler.
During the run-up to her midnight performance, Raymond and his partner, comedian Chick Williams, show Rachel the ropes of burlesque, and they both fall for her in the process. Meanwhile, Rachel's stern father, 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 Raymond and the Minskys are just using her. Her father tries to drag her offstage, but she resists, tearing 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. She looks into the wings and sees Raymond, who senses a raid and perhaps the end of an era, leaving the theater for good. Rachel 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 to the stage and close down the show. A madcap melee follows. In the end, most of the cast members are loaded into a paddy wagon, including Rachel's bewildered father.
Cast
Production
Background
In his book Minsky's Burlesque, Morton Minsky 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 the dozens to which we had become accustomed; certainly no big crisis."Minsky's theater, the National Winter Garden on Houston Street, was raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absentmindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings. When the crowd cheered, Dix returned to the stage and continued removing her clothing to wild applause. Morton's older brother, Billy, 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, however, they were raided.
According to Morton Minsky, Mademoiselle Fifi was a woman named Mary Dawson from Pennsylvania. Morton suggests that Billy persuaded Dawson to expose her breasts 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 were stationary in a "living tableau". Mademoiselle Fifi stripped to the waist but moved, triggering the raid. "Although the show, in general, had been tame," Morton wrote, "Fifi's finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be-opened theater uptown ."
In 1975, Mary Dawson, then 85, refuted the legend. "I was never a stripteaser. I never did anything risque." She said that novelist Rowland Barber "just put all that in the book to make it better". She claimed she was not even at the theater that night. Her father was a police officer and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid on one of the Minsky burlesque houses.
Pre-production
In April 1961, producer Leonard Key outbid several others for the stage rights to Rowland Barber's book. At that time it was reported to be the highest price ever paid for such rights, and that the novel would be adapted by screenwriter Edward Chodorov. Later in the year, however, Key had enlisted screenwriter Julius J. Epstein. At these early stages, Sammy Cahn as well as Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini were rumored to write the music. The show never found financial backing before the option for the stage rights ran out two years later in 1963.Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin bought the film rights in September 1965. Lear originally announced that production would begin in the fall of 1966. Dick Shawn was reportedly considered for the "lead role" in July 1966. However, filming didn't begin until a year later, on October 8, 1967.
On May 23, 1967, the Los Angeles Times reported that William Friedkin was set to direct. Friedkin's first film, Good Times, starring Sonny and Cher, had just been released. A musical comedy that spoofs various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns, and spy thrillers, it was a critical and box-office flop. Friedkin was quoted as saying that The Night They Raided Minskys will be a "poetic reality".
Arnold Schulman wrote the first draft but was replaced.
Casting
was cast as Raymond Paine in June 1967, but dropped out a month later over creative differences. Alan Alda, whose father, Robert Alda, had been in burlesque, was cast as Paine, but was unable to leave his role on Broadway in The Apple Tree. Jason Robards took over the Paine role about a month before filming began. Elliott Gould, who was then married to Barbra Streisand, was signed in August 1967 and made his film debut as Billy Minsky.Mickey Rooney was said to be considered for the Chick Williams role, but Joel Grey, then on Broadway in Cabaret, was initially cast. Grey had to drop out, however, because the film had no firm end date and Grey was committed to starting rehearsals for George M!, a musical about George M. Cohan, in mid-December. British comedian Norman Wisdom, who had recently been nominated for a Tony Award for his acclaimed performance in the James Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn musical comedy Walking Happy, was cast. Wisdom had made a series of low-budget star-vehicle comedies for the Rank Organisation. Never highly regarded by critics, Wisdom's films had enjoyed good box-office returns in his native country. The Night They Raided Minsky's was his first American film, and he received good notices. A contributor to Variety wrote: "So easily does Wisdom dominate his many scenes, other cast members suffer by comparison", and Time compared him to Buster Keaton.
The songs were written by the Broadway team of composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams, who had won a Tony Award for the musical Bye Bye Birdie in 1961, and went on to win Tonys for Applause and Annie. Strouse also wrote the theme song "Those Were The Days" for Lear's sitcom All in the Family. The score was orchestrated and conducted by Broadway veteran Philip J. Lang, working on his only film made for theatrical release.
Production
The Night They Raided Minsky's was the first musical shot entirely on location in New York City. The budget exceeded $3 million, making it the most expensive film shot in the city up to that time. A block of East 26th Street between First and Second Avenues was transformed into the Lower East Side 1925. Parking meters were disguised by garbage cans and barrels. Exteriors were shot there for two weeks. A portion of an elevated train station 30 feet tall and 56 feet long was built. A scene in a subway car was filmed on the Myrtle Avenue elevated in Brooklyn. Some interiors were filmed at Chelsea Studios. The theater sequences were filmed at what was then the Gayety Theater, at 181 Second Avenue on the Lower East Side.The Night They Raided Minsky's was Bert Lahr's last film. The 72-year-old comedian, best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, was a veteran of the old Columbia burlesque wheel. Lahr was hospitalized on November 21 for what was reported as a back ailment. In Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr, his son, 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 already 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 test footage of Lahr, plus an uncredited voice double and a body double, burlesque legend Joey Faye, to complete the late comedian's role.
Filming began on October 8 and was scheduled to wrap on December 22, 1967. The movie was released exactly a year later, on December 22, 1968.