The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 26, 2015

There’s an inherent irony in the title of The Night They Raided Minsky’s because evidently there were several nights the police raided the famed burlesque emporium. Burlesque, the slightly naughtier, more ribald cousin of vaudeville, had to tiptoe around various obscenity laws, and the Minsky family rather cleverly managed to skirt (no pun intended) various strictures while never going so far over the line as to have their business permanently closed. In real life that meant a near constant state of police oversight and, frequently, those aforementioned raids. A probably apocryphal legend built up around one of these raids, and that tale forms the basis of this whimsical love letter to a bygone age’s rather innocent seeming entertainment. This early effort on the part of director William Friedkin ( The French Connection, The Exorcist) presages some of the loosey-goosey, quick cutting style that Bob Fosse would exploit to great effect in Cabaret a few years after this film’s 1968 debut. In this case, that structural frenzy is supposedly due more to the efforts of editor Ralph Rosenblum, who went on record as stating he had saved a supposedly unsalavagable picture (there’s some interesting information here, just one of several online resources recounting some of the film’s troubled production and post-production history).

Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt Ekland) is a sweet and innocent Amish girl who has escaped from a life down on the farm to journey to that den of iniquity, New York City, in the early part of the 20th century. Rosenblum establishes the historical bona fides of the film by repeatedly weaving archival footage and (occasionally) stills into the proceedings, segueing back and forth between color and black and white. It’s sweetly quaint but also a bit disruptive, especially later in the film after the main narrative has gained a bit of momentum. Rachel is seemingly magnetically drawn to Minsky’s, where she almost immediately meets Professor Spats (Bert Lahr in his last film performance), who gets her inside the door and in turn introduces her to the hall’s star attraction, Raymond Paine (Jason Robards).

Paine is part of a comedy duo with Chick Williams (Norman Wisdom), and both of the comedians aren’t exactly blind to Rachel’s rather obvious charms. Rachel wants to audition to be a dancer, but having grown up Amish, her dances tend to be “interpretive” essays outlining various Biblical texts, not exactly the sort of thing that delights the average burlesque audience. Rachel’s own naivete sparks an idea, though, that is hoped will at least remove the constant harassment of a local do-gooder named Vance Fowler (Denholm Elliott), a relentless campaigner against vice whose mission it is to shut down Minsky's. It's decided to market Rachel as an infamous French terpsichorean, one who is perfectly capable of delighting that typical burlesque audience. It's hoped that Fowler and his goons will show up to shut down the show, only to be horribly embarrassed once Rachel starts trotting out her scriptural steps, something that not even Fowler should find even minimally objectionable.

Playing out against this fanciful gambit is a subplot involving young Billy Minsky (Elliott Gould), who is struggling to keep the family business alive, especially since his natty father Louis (Joseph Wiseman) isn’t especially interested in renewing Billy’s building lease. A scheme to unload the building on a local mobster named Trim Houlihan (Forrest Tucker) is similarly unsuccessful. All of this comes to a head and dovetails into the plot to foist Rachel off as the supposedly scandalous Mademoiselle Fifi.

At this point The Night They Raided Minsky’s starts piling on more quasi-farcical elements, bringing Rachel’s stunned father (Harry Andrews) into the fray in a desperate gamble to get his virginal daughter out of the clutches of the show business devils. Friedkin and/or Rosenblum build things to a decent head of steam, but then fail to really let the madness pay off, substituting a crazed melee with seltzer bottles in lieu of any more forceful hilarity.

The Night They Raided Minsky’s never quite works, and yet it’s often quite enjoyable. Perhaps chief among its plotting faults is the romantic pairing between Rachel and Paine, when really the more age appropriate couple would be Rachel and Billy Minsky. The film is a field day for theater lovers, however, not only in its recreation of a bygone age but also due to the talent both on screen and off. Chief among the casting delights is the impish Norman Wisdom, who at that point was relatively recently coming off of his Tony nominated work in the Cahn-Van Heusen musical version of Hobson's Choice, Walking Happy. And the “below the line” credits include composer Charles Strouse, who the previous year had made his feature film composing debut with Bonnie and Clyde. Broadway lovers will of course recognize Strouse as part of a team with Lee Adams, who together wrote Bye Bye Birdie, All American, Golden Boy, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman! and Applause (the musical version of All About Eve). Later, with other collaborators like Martin Charnin, Strouse composed the music for hits like Annie . Strouse and Adams also have one fun television credit theme to their name, the wonderful Those Were the Days that featured Archie and Edith Bunker warbling at the start of every All in the Family, and it’s that sort of honky-tonk musical vocabulary that Strouse exploits in his score for this film. The musical sequences, while staged and filmed somewhat haphazardly, are one of The Night They Raided Minsky’s’ most appealing achievements.

The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Night They Raided Minsky's is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The film advertises itself proudly as having been shot in its entirety in New York City, and there's a certain grittiness to Andrew Laszlo's cinematography that's quite evocative. This is a fairly grainy presentation, to the point that some midrange shots can look decidedly indistinct (see screenshot 8). Under controlled lighting and in close-ups especially, detail and fine detail can be quite appealing (see screenshots 2 and 5). Colors are nicely suffused but have perhaps faded just very slightly. There's a fair amount of age related wear and tear on display, and of course the archival footage is in various states of decay, with attendant damage, softness and occasional inherent image instability. The Night They Raided Minsky's follows in Olive's longstanding tradition of a "hands off" presentation, one that preserves the organic sensibilities of the original film elements while not indulging in any restorative efforts.

The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Night They Raided Minsky's features a serviceable if occasionally slightly boxy sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track. Dialogue is presented cleanly, though the film can be rather noisy at times, leading to occasionally buried lines in the overall mix. Strouse's music resonates clearly and cleanly. Fidelity is very good and there are no problems of any kind to warrant concern.

The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 3:03)

The Night They Raided Minsky's Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ekland proves herself to be a rather game comedienne in this appealing if flawed film, and the rest of the cast offers wonderful moments as well. The romantic pairing between Ekland and Robards is at least a little problematic, and the film's seams tend to show despite the reportedly heroic efforts of editor Rosenblum to whip Friedkin's chaotic scenes into some kind of order. The film might have done a bit better had it gone flat out for farce. Instead it's sweetly nostalgic with a slightly farcical undertone, two elements that don't always mesh together completely organically. Technical merits are generally very good to excellent, and with caveats noted, The Night They Raided Minsky's comes Recommended.