In 1925 Rachel Schpitendavel, an innocent Amish girl from rural Pennsylvania, arrives in New York's Lower East Side hoping to make it as a dancer.

But Billy Minsky and the show's jaded straight man, Raymond Paine, concoct a plan to use Rachel to foil moral crusader Vance Fowler, who is intent on shutting down the theater.

Minsky publicizes Rachel as the notorious Madamoiselle Fifi, performing the "dance that drove a million Frenchmen wild", hoping it will prompt a raid by Fowler and the police.

Minsky's theater, the National Winter Garden on Houston Street, was raided for the first time in 1917 when Mae Dix absentmindedly began removing her costume before she reached the wings.

By 1925, it was permissible for girls in legitimate shows staged by Ziegfeld, George White and Earl Carroll – as well as burlesque – to appear topless as long as they were stationary in a "living tableau".

"Although the show, in general, had been tame," Morton wrote, "Fifi's finale and the publicity that soon followed the raid ensured full houses at the soon-to-be-opened [Minsky's] theater uptown [on 42nd Street]."

Her father was a police officer and a straitlaced Quaker, although he never came to New York City and never led a raid on one of the Minsky burlesque houses.

A musical comedy that spoofs various movie genres, including mysteries, westerns, and spy thrillers, it was a critical and box-office flop.

[12] British comedian Norman Wisdom, who had recently been nominated for a Tony Award for his acclaimed performance in the James Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn musical comedy Walking Happy, was cast.

A contributor to Variety wrote: "So easily does Wisdom dominate his many scenes, other cast members suffer by comparison", and Time compared him to Buster Keaton.

(The vacant tenements on the block were scheduled to be torn down as part of an urban renewal project, but the city postponed demolition for the filmmakers.)

Ordinarily, a man of his age and reputation would not have had to perform that late into the night, but he had waived that proviso in his contract because of his trust in the producer and his need to work.

Norman Lear told The New York Times that "through judicious editing, we will be able to shoot the rest of the film so that his wonderful performance will remain intact."

Film editor Ralph Rosenblum documented his experience working on The Night They Raided Minsky's in his 1979 book (written with Robert Karen), When the Shooting Stops ...The Cutting Begins.

I had just come off six months on The Producers, a trying experience that pickled my nerve endings, and I badly needed a soothing job...The script revealed a frothy, unimportant film full of musical numbers, the kind of thing that might be snapped into shape in six to eight weeks of editing.

Drawing on his background editing documentaries, Rosenblum turned to the huge stock film libraries in New York and began selecting clips from the 1920s.

By arduous trial and error, this footage was used not only to evoke a sense of time and place but also to comment on and enhance scenes in the film.

While Rosenblum worked over the cut throughout most of 1968, Lear was developing other projects, including one that would become the TV series All in the Family; Friedkin, meanwhile, was in England, directing the film adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.

Friedkin later admitted to having "no vision" for Minsky's and instead borrowed from Rouben Mamoulian's film Applause (1929), an early talkie about burlesque notable for its innovative camera work.

Norman produced it and he was a very difficult, tough guy to work with, but I learned a great deal from him and I was struggling every day on the set.

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "The Night They Raided Minsky's is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick extravaganza, but it isn't.

"[citation needed] The New York Times critic Renata Adler wrote, "The nicest thing about the movie, which is a little broad in plot and long in spots, is its denseness and care in detail: The little ugly cough that comes from one room of a shoddy hotel; the thoughtfully worked out, poorly danced vaudeville routines; the beautifully timed, and genuinely funny, gags.

Like the burlesque, it glorifies – and with tender loving care – this boisterous, colorful, wiggling eulogy to the Lower East Side bump-and-grind culture of the 1920s is plotless, frenetic, funny, and just as good as the real thing.

It's nostalgic as all get out to see the lumpy dumpy chorus, the snorers and the leerers and the lechers around the runway, the Crazy House bit and the spielers, and, beyond the theater, the East Side in its glory from the barrels of half-sours to the knishes to the Murphy-bedded hotel rooms.

Director William Friedkin (this was his pre-The Birthday Party film) proves his sense of cinema again by remarkable intersplicing of newsreels and striking use of black-and-white fade-ins to color."

But it compensates with a fond, nostalgic score, a bumping, grinding chorus line, and a series of closeups of the late Bert Lahr, who plays a retired burlesque comedian.

[19] According to an interview in the Manchester Evening News (published October 22, 2007), The Night They Raided Minsky's is Britt Ekland's favorite film of hers.

[20] Ekland was quoted, "I loved William Friedkin who directed me in the film The Night They Raided Minky's because he was very specific and honest and young.

"[21] In 1972, Daily Variety reported that Yorkin and Lear were adapting The Night They Raided Minsky's for a half-hour CBS sitcom called Slowly I Turned, set in the 1920s.

[22] A stage adaptation as a musical, titled Minsky's, opened officially on February 6, 2009, at the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles, and ran through March 1, 2009.