* This post is presented as part of Sister Celluloid and Movies Silently's Contrary to Popular Opinion blogathon and, as such, is a defense of what I consider to be an unfairly maligned and unjustly generally ignored film, The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968). To see the full blogathon, visit sistercelluloid.com
All of my favorite William Friedkin films are generally considered his secondary works-- The Boys in the Band, Sorcerer, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A., and one that's barely even considered, The Night They Raided Minsky's. These films are every bit as inventive and artistically vital as his mega-hits like The French Connection and The Exorcist, but for various reasons never had the same galvanic impact on audiences.
Minsky's tells the 95% fictionalized story of how an Amish girl invented the striptease at Billy Minsky's burlesque theater in 1925 New York. (This is no spoiler since crooner Rudy Vallee tells you as much in a prologue). Much of the film is a backstage farce, a la The Boy Friend and Noises Off. Minsky's was part of a 1920s-1930s nostalgia wave in the late '60s, when throwback hits like "Winchester Cathedral" and The Beatles' "Honey Pie" were all the rage. But the beauty of it is that the only way that it really feels "'60s" is in some of its mod editing, like during its rat-a-tat-tat opening credits. The rest of the film is pure, deep-dish 1920s New York, shot on a block of tenements about to be demolished. In the wake of New York's fall to gentrification, this gives the film a special historical poignancy, particularly during its opening.
On a critical level, I have to confess that Minsky's gets too wacky for its own good sometimes. Stan Laurel told actor Alan Young "If you're going to be funny, don't be funny doing it." Minsky's could use some of that kind of restraint, in spots. With that said, star Jason Robards can do no wrong in my book and he kills as Lee Tracy-like top banana comic Raymond Paine, BFC ("Bastard First Class"). Robards fast-talking his way out of his botched pick-up of a married woman is a virtuoso performance, and I could watch him and Norman Wisdom perform their "Perfect Gentleman" number all day. The sheer precision and variety of Robards' and Wisdom's comic business in that scene is astounding and holds up after dozens of viewings. The late film historian and professor Gene Stavis, who once followed Minsky's from theater to theater as it moved around New York, once aptly told me "Minsky's is eternal."
I am admittedly no scholar on burlesque theater, so I can't unequivocally praise Friedkin's recreations of burly-q shows, but the film's vision of Minsky's acts just FEELS real through and through. (It was convincing enough to be rotoscoped for use in the burlesque scenes in Ralph Bakski's animated American Pop). It doesn't have Bob Fosse's trademark fixation on sordidness like in Cabaret's Kit Kat Club numbers, but it still has just the right amount of tawdriness. Friedkin isn't out to make any overt statements like Fosse--he's focused on capturing burlesque's silly, bawdy, gently sleazy charm. Unlike Fosse's performers, Friedkin's painted-and-powdered Criswell-like Emcee during the "Take Ten Terrific Girls (in Only Nine Costumes)" number is just ghoulish enough to be funny without being macabre. And Friedkin's dancers in their garish pastel outfits and makeups look just blousy enough without falling into Weimar loathsomeness.
That's where Minsky's really excels: in the likable balance of so many of its parts, including an affection for the bygone days of burlesque leavened with ironic amusement at that innocuous brand of ribaldry. Irony in large quantities can be fatal to any movie, and Friedkin makes the film JUST ironic enough. It's also not too seedy, too wistful, too innocent, or too romantic to ever lose its charm, which it largely maintains.
I could spend paragraphs upon paragraphs praising the supporting cast, but I will briefly single out Denholm Elliott as the pale, sweaty Legion of Decency rep intent on shutting Minsky's down at the first sign of a nipple and Joseph Wiseman as Billy Minsky's wry sage of a father ("Where there's smoke, there's salmon.). And in spite of Minsky's broad slapstick, there is a wistful, elegiac undercurrent of loss, personified by the faded vaudevillian Professor Spats (actual vaudevillian Burt Lahr, in his final performance). When Spats surveys the wreckage onstage after the titular raid, his expression beautifully evokes the loss of an era, a theatrical form, and a peculiar kind of innocence. The flash of breasts that sparks the raid is the beginning of the end--the genie is out of the proverbial bottle, and the form now has to one-up itself with stripping, then something harder, then something harder still, then descend into the 42nd Street Purgatory of the '70s and '80s.
To put it simply, I love this film, whatever its faults may be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROLgwF_Bqhs
