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, Chick, 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 (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 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 [Minsky's] theater uptown [on 42nd Street]." (The Minskys did not stage burlesque on 42nd Street until 1931 when they leased the Republic Theater. They had a short-lived venture at the Park Theater on Columbus Circle in 1922 but left that theater after only a year. They leased the Apollo Theater on 125th Street from 1924 until 1933, after which it became famous as a showcase for African-American talent.)