Dance Hall Racket (1953)

Apparently, this film was at some point titled Shame Shanty, and it’s kind of a shame that it was changed. The story and screenplay are by Lenny Bruce

There are evocative scenes of taxi dancers picking the pockets of the men who pay them to shuffle around the dance floor. There’s a girl-on-girl brawl. One of the girls hustles a mark for the last $70 she needs for her mother’s surgery. Vaudevillian Sally Marr (in real life, Lenny Bruce’s mom) dances the Charleston in a scene that should be included in the material sent out to intergalactic sentient beings.

One of the club boss’s henchmen is Joe Piro, who may or may not be the same guy who became disco king “Killer Joe.” Rose, the hooker, is Honey Harlow (in real life, married to Lenny Bruce). She tries to steal a mark’s wallet. He objects, and Vinnie (that’s Lenny) kills him. They have to get the body out of there undetected. Federal authorities are interested in the dance hall owner, who is suspected of smuggling diamonds. An undercover agent, posing as a sailor, is sent in.

A gangster, whose tongue was cut out, gets out of prison, and has a quarter million dollars worth of gold hidden away. The dance hall boss throws a party for him and gives him Rose for a welcome-back present. Uh-oh! Vinnie swings into action, kills the boss, seizes the gangster, shoots it out with the undercover agent, and gets killed.

Related:
Dry Hustle

Sin, You Sinners (1963)

Bobbi is an over-the-hill but still spirited exotic dancer. Somebody ought to remake this movie with Madonna in the great role of Bobbi. Aided by the power of a Haitian amulet, she holds in thrall a guy named Dave, a born loser she pulled out of the gutter. But Dave can’t keep his hands off Bobbi’s daughter, young Julie, who looks like one of those “draw me” art school ads that used to be in the backs of magazines.

There’s some kind of honky voodoo ceremony, where Julie gets to show her stuff. She and Dave run away together, and there’s some very Freudian cross-cutting between their tryst, and Bobbi’s onstage bump-and-grind. The amulet does its work, and Dave comes crawling back. Desolate Julie wanders out into the night and is stalked by a leering man rolling a cigar around his mouth in the most hideously lascivious way.

This terminally camp film is odd, in that long stretches of it seem as if they were made for a silent film. It’s broadly acted, like a silent. Yet, there is dialogue – sometimes, lots of it. But the sound quality is awful and the continuity is sub-par. On the other hand, there’s human sacrifice in the club’s storeroom, and Julie ends up with the amulet.

Carny (1980)

Frankie (Gary Busey) gets made up to do his turn as Bozo. The job description is: sit in a cage and aggravate the male carnival visitors, so they will spend lots of money buying balls to throw at him. If they hit a lever just right, he gets dumped in the water. These rubes just have to show off for their girlfriends. Of course the best way to irritate a redneck is to impugn his manhood. “Don’t be queer,” Bozo sneers. The Bozo persona is truly provoking, with a flat twangy voice and an aura of malice. “You know why she’s shorter than you?” he taunts one guy. “It’s because she shrinks from your touch.”

Actually, Frankie is a pretty nice guy. We see examples of this, for instance at breakfast, when he and his buddy Patch (Robbie Robertson) are both accompanied by their one-night-stands. Frankie is sweet to the girl he picked up and partied with. Patch smokes a joint and ignores his own girl. His motto is, “I like to see ‘em come, and I like to see ‘em go.”

Patch is the carnival’s fixer. He fixes situations with money, free passes, or violent attack, whatever it takes. I love his look, and felt moved to paint a portrait of Robertson in this role (down the page.) Patch is cool but not cold. When an old-timer gives his farewell speech, the fixer wipes away a furtive tear.

If the marks don’t buy tickets to the Garden of Earthly Delights, the barker accuses them of not having normal sexual appetites. The carnival world is permeated with sex, a bachelor’s paradise where Frankie and Patch have shared girls and swapped girls. Then, into this testosterone-saturated atmosphere comes Donna (Jodie Foster). At she hooks up with Frankie, who treats her with respect and genuine caring. He encourages Donna to believe in her own instincts and powers of observation, which can be a double-edged weapon likely to hurt friends and the self, as much as enemies.

Donna’s cocky attitude gets the two friends attacked by truckers in a restaurant. Patch starts falling apart. He’s already thinking he’s getting to old to be a hired muscle guy, and now this woman is getting him into stupid fights for no reason. And she can’t resist playing him and Frankie off against each other. This is a sad commentary on the tendency of some women to take pride in their ability to set men at each other’s throats. In their eyes, this is a legitimate kind of empowerment. But they’re wrong.

And hey! Men do it too. In fact, riling people up is Frankie’s profession. Sure, he says he does Bozo not for the money, but as a student of human nature. But he’s just a little too good at doing Bozo. He’s earned himself some disturber-of-the-peace karma that’s coming back to bite him in the ass with Donna’s teeth, as it were.

“We’re crossing some state lines here. How old is Donna?” Patch sees Donna as an impediment to his partnership with Frankie, and tries to get rid of her. She claims to be 18, so he can’t ditch her with the underage excuse. You guessed it – before long, it’s Donna and Patch. Part of the problem here is that Frankie sees her as a rare blossom, far too good for life on the midway. But Patch is up for changing her into a carny, and succeeds, by getting her in the girly show. When that doesn’t work out, he finds her a job in a concession booth. Kissing her, he says, “You don’t even feel like a mark any more.”

Frankie has to find Patch for a rumble. When he stumbles in on Donna and Patch making it, he’s almost apologetic. Soon he’s back in the cage as Bozo, “rangin’ up” the yahoos, who don’t need any encouragement, because they’re already wrecking the place. Patch shows up and tells him to cool it, but Bozo is on a suicidal run, carrying on as if only exorcism would settle him down. The yahoos knock over his cage, and Patch extricates him. Then they have a serious fight and Patch says, “You and I are gonna disconnect.”

A bunch of really bad shit happens, and the two friends work together to fix a situation for Donna. They also make up, but then Frankie suggests he might move on. Patch says no, and Donna stays too. Patch decides to take a turn in the Bozo cage. He’s always been too cool for that kind of thing, before. You get the impression that they’ve each made the decision to continue on as a threesome, and that they’re each willing to make whatever adjustments or accommodations are needed, in order to do that.

Interested in the portrait of Robbie Robertson as Patch?
Email Pat Hartman hartman (at) frii.com