A raucous and convoluted comic masterpiece packed with all the irreverent spirit of the late-1960s, William Friedkin's THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S is a hilarious social critique of the perrenial American clash between cosmopolitan arts and puritanical roots. When young Rachel... [More]

A raucous and convoluted comic masterpiece packed with all the irreverent spirit of the late-1960s, William Friedkin's THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S is a hilarious social critique of the perrenial American clash between cosmopolitan arts and puritanical roots. When young Rachel Schpitendavel (Britt Ekland) abandons her rural Amish home for a life as a dancer in New York, she finds herself at Minsky's burlesque, a family operation changing hands from the conservative and skeptical father, Louis Minsky (Joseph Wiseman), to the liberal and daring young son, Billy Minsky (Elliot Gould). Plagued by a dour moral crusader threatening to have the city shut the place down for obscenity, Minsky and company concoct a plan to humiliate the police by advertising a striptease but then switching the program to Rachel's Amish biblical dance at the last moment. Things don't go according to plan when Rachel's furious Amish father, her lovesick gangster boyfriend, and her fellow actors' backstage fight for her love all clash in a climactic catastrophe that results in the surprising accidental invention of the striptease. [Less]