General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Night They Raided Minsky's

The Night They Raided Minsky's is a 1968 American musical comedy film directed by William Friedkin, produced by Norman Lear, and based on Rowland Barber's 1960 novel of the same title. Set in 1925 on New York City's Lower East Side, it follows Rachel Schpitendavel, a young Amish woman from Pennsylvania who comes to New York to dance Bible scenes and instead ends up on the stage of Minsky's Burlesque, where a police raid accidentally turns her performance into the invention of the striptease.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	Los Angeles opening 18 December 1968 at the Vogue Theatre; New York opening 21 December 1968; 100 minutes, color (De Luxe)¹
Director / producer	William Friedkin; produced by Norman Lear for Tandem Productions, Inc., with partner Bud Yorkin¹
Source	Based on the 1960 novel The Night They Raided Minsky's by Rowland Barber (Simon & Schuster)¹^•²
Principal cast	Jason Robards Jr. (Raymond Paine), Britt Ekland (Rachel Schpitendavel), Norman Wisdom (Chick Williams), Elliott Gould (Billy Minsky), Bert Lahr (Professor Spats), Denholm Elliott (Vance Fowler)¹
Music	Songs with words by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse, who also wrote the score; narration credited to Rudy Vallee³^•¹
Filming	9 October to late December 1967, on location in New York City¹
Reception	Metascore 67 (generally favorable); 67% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot

In 1925, Billy Minsky (Elliott Gould) risks losing the National Winter Garden theater, which houses his family's burlesque show. Although his father Louis (Joseph Wiseman) owns the theater, he threatens not to renew his son's lease because of harassment by Vance Fowler's (Denholm Elliott) Society for the Suppression of Vice, and racketeer Trim Houlihan (Forrest Tucker) refuses to buy the building. Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt Ekland), a young Pennsylvania Amish woman who has run away from her strict father Jacob (Harry Andrews) to dance Bible scenes on stage, attracts the attention of the show's top banana, Raymond Paine (Jason Robards Jr.), and fall guy, Chick Williams (Norman Wisdom). Paine circulates a rumor that Rachel will perform the indecent dance of Mademoiselle Fifi, the French heroine of pornographic pamphlets, planning to provoke a raid during which the police will discover only an innocent Bible dance and retreat in embarrassment.¹

On the night of the performance the plan goes wrong. Rachel's father arrives to take her home, and when she defies everyone by going on stage he tries to stop her and accidentally tears her dress. Encouraged by the audience's response, she abandons her Bible dance and begins to peel off her clothes; reaching out to the disapproving Paine, she lets the dress fall. Fowler signals the raid, and Billy Minsky and Rachel are arrested. As the cast is herded out of the theater, the cheering crowd treats them as folk heroes rather than criminals. The striptease has been born.¹^•⁶

Production

Development and casting. Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin acquired screen rights to Barber's novel in summer 1965, with plans to shoot in February 1967 as part of a $20-million Tandem production slate. National General Pictures, which had a two-picture deal with the pair, declined the project, and United Artists agreed to finance and release it.¹ Tony Curtis was originally cast as Raymond Paine but left over differences about his role; Alan Alda was hired as his replacement, then departed because of a scheduling conflict with the Broadway musical The Apple Tree, and Jason Robards Jr. took the part.¹

Shooting. Principal photography, initially planned for Los Angeles, was moved to New York City, where the story is set, and ran from 9 October to late December 1967. Locations included the former burlesque Gaiety Theatre on 2nd Avenue and 12th Street and an entire block of 26th Street between First and Second Avenues, which Mayor John V. Lindsay granted a last-minute reprieve from demolition so filming could take place there.¹ Cinematographer Andrew Laszlo used a specially developed camera that allowed steadier handheld photography, supporting Friedkin's improvisational style; Friedkin called it "the most expensive movie ever made with a hand-held camera."⁷ Friedkin said he shot scenes to look like newsreel footage, and that the choice to "bleed the film" into color followed the discovery that archival newsreels were in black and white.⁸

Bert Lahr's death. On 3 December 1967, with two weeks of filming still remaining, the 72-year-old Bert Lahr, who played Professor Spats, died. Lear said that through judicious editing the performance would remain virtually intact; the final edit reportedly required every frame filmed of the actor, including test footage and doubles, with voice-over imitation when needed.¹ It was Lahr's final film role.⁹

Editing. Editor Ralph Rosenblum later recalled that the goal had been to create "an old-fashioned musical with a New Look," a style he compared, in hindsight, to the approach of director Richard Lester. One commentator argues the film's deliberately disjointed tone, cutting between raucous stage comedy and somber romance and dipping location shots into black and white to blend with 1920s stock footage, was saved in the editing room.¹⁰

Historical basis and accuracy

The film dramatizes a police raid on a Minsky burlesque theater, an event that has a place in the history of American burlesque. The Ohio State University Libraries exhibition on burlesque dates one of the most famous raids of a prominent Minsky theater to April 20, 1925, and calls it what many consider the beginning of the end for burlesque; the same account records that antiburlesque legislators succeeded in outlawing burlesque in New York City beginning in 1937.¹¹ Morton Minsky, the last of the burlesque brothers and a technical adviser on the film, told the Los Angeles Times that a 1927 police raid of one of the family's theaters, with 12 arrests, a riot, and a summons served on his brother Abraham for smoking a cigar backstage, became the basis of the movie.¹² A Kirkus review of Barber's 1960 book identifies the raid as one by John Sumner that brought the Minskys to trial.²

The film takes liberties with this history. It suggests that the night of the raid was "the night they invented striptease," although striptease-like dancing existed in the United States well before 1925: Sol Bloom was reportedly profiting from "hoochie coochie" shows by 1893, and trapeze performer Charmion was acknowledged to be doing striptease routines by 1896. La Guardia later officially banned the words "burlesque" and "Minsky" in advertisements and on marquees.¹²

Reception and legacy

The picture opened in December 1968 to mixed reviews, with consistent praise for its production design and art direction. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars in the Chicago Sun-Times, writing that it avoids the phony glamour the movies usually use to smother burlesque and "really seems to understand this most-American art form"; Renata Adler in The New York Times praised its density and care in detail; Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it "a shambles, yet a lot of it is charming."¹^•⁴ United Artists heavily promoted first-time actor Dexter Maitland, whose promising debut was said to have earned him a long-term Tandem deal, but the picture marked his only feature film appearance.¹

By early 1970 the film had grossed $3 million in film rentals, and in March 1969 the Museum of Modern Art requested a print for its permanent collection.¹ It was released on DVD in 2015 and is rated PG-13 (brief nudity, suggestive content).⁵ A stage musical adaptation, conceived by director Mike Ockrent with choreography planned by Susan Stroman, was announced for the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in summer 2000 but was sidetracked when Ockrent died of cancer in December 1999; discussions about a Goodspeed Musicals premiere were reported in 2004.¹³

The film is also an early entry in Friedkin's career, made after his directorial debut Good Times (1967) and before the thrillers The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) for which he is best known.¹⁰^•⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026