TV pioneer Norman Lear died in December. In tribute, we went back to a movie he co-wrote when he was on the brink of shaking up network television in the 1970s.
THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S (1968) (B) - There is a bit of an embarrassing back story that explains this obscure choice from Norman Lear's oeuvre, a film he co-wrote with two others. Let's go back to the mid-'70s, when Lear was the king of prime time. It was an era when local TV stations would commonly follow the 10 o'clock news with an old movie. One night, when I was barely in my teens, this slapstick homage to the days of vaudeville popped up in a late-night slot, and I settled in to watch.
The film, set early in the 20th century, is about a young Amish woman, Rachel Schpitendavel (take that, Mel Brooks), who wants to share her religious dancing with a wider audience, so she goes to New York City, where she ends up at a raunchy burlesque venue inquiring about an opportunity. The managers don't really know what to do with this delicate innocent. Eventually, as a way to troll the local censors breathing down their necks, they come up with the idea of teasing Rachel as a mysterious exotic dancer from France only to present her performing her chaste dance.
Here's where the teenage me comes in. I loved the movie because it was about classic comedy, and one of my favorite movies back in the '70s was "The Sunshine Boys," another ode to vaudeville. I was content to enjoy the broad stylings of the Minsky's duo of Raymond Paine and Chick Williams (Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom), but I was also drawn, of course, to Rachel, played by '60s it-girl Britt Ekland. It's not giving too much away to report that during a climactic scene, when Rachel finally gets her turn on stage, that she, unintentionally, bares some flesh to the crowd. Now, on Channel 2 back in the day, they would have edited out any nudity -- if, in fact, the movie itself revealed Ekland's bare torso in any way. My young self didn't know either way. The TV edit left everything to my imagination. And what a powerful imagination I had back then. And what a steely memory I have since forged, well into middle age. To this day, when prompted to remember this movie, I would wonder: Does the movie actually cut to a shot of the breasts of Ekland('s body double)?
In memory of the dear centenarian Norman Lear, I vowed to finally find out through the technology of home DVD.
Lear was, by all accounts, a kind and generous man as well as a legendary producer of foundational sitcoms throughout the 1970s. He was profiled in a documentary in 2016, which we reviewed here. "All in the Family" still holds up to this day as a biting satire of ignorance and bigotry. The cringe factor among his other shows is surprisingly low considering the passage of a half century and the evolution of sensibilities in the culture. Networks are still replaying and remaking that and Lear's other shows, most recently "One Day at a Time." If you have any memory before 1970, you have to acknowledge that Lear permanently reconfigured television, with a legacy that lingers to this day, through "Roseanne" and "Black-ish" and the whole Chuck Lorre catalog. Lear cut his teeth on 1950s variety shows and a few well-considered scripts in the '60s, such as "Divorce American Style" and "Come Blow Your Horn" (with Neil Simon of "Sunshine Boys" fame). He teamed with Arnold Schulman and Sidney Michaels for "Minsky's." The fun songs are by Charles Strouse ("Bonnie and Clyde") and Lee Adams ("Bye Bye Birdie")
William Friedkin sat behind the camera for "Minsky's," honing his craft for his own '70s run. (His next three films would be "The Boys in the Band," "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist.") His shots are hectic and choppy, providing a jangled sense of the zaniness of entertainment that was popular in theater houses a hundred years ago. He overplays the gimmick of taking old black-and-white documentary footage from the streets of Manhattan and morphing it into fresh color scenes. But he serves the wild comedy well, perhaps even setting the table for "Cabaret," even if the touch is much lighter.
Robards is wonderful as the Bud Abbott-like straight man and Rachel's would-be seducer. Wisdom, a British clown, is delightful as a more physical Costello who quietly pines for Rachel's company. Ekland stands around a lot looking pretty and discombobulated, her ginger bangs never budging an inch, while she struggles through a German accent. The bench is deep, with Elliott Gould mensching it up as the son of the owner who is threatening to close Minsky's, vice squad or no; Denholm Elliott as the snooty censor; ol' Bert Lahr as the fading star named Spats; Forrest Tucker as a hoodlum (and Richard Libertini as his goon); Lear favorite Gloria LeRoy as the sassy dancing girl; and Jack Burns as a warm-up comic.
The film is packed with throwaway one-liners and goofy plot twists, and Friedkin is generous with the skits and songs, many of which stand on their own as fine seltzer-soaked representatives of a lost era. ("Nurse! Nurse!") And it all builds to that fateful climax, as Ekland's Rachel sashays on the stage. Will she truly invent the striptease on the spot? Has this been, for me, the longest tease in the history of moving pictures?
Now that I've seen my share of bare breasts, will this whole experiment fall flat (so to speak) as anti-climactic? Oh, just give it a go and have a romp. Find out for yourself. I'm no longer (as) desperate for a glimpse of a boob, but may my 13-year-old's mindset never fade away.
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