Dance Hall Racket (USA, 1953) 57 min B&W DIR: Phil Tucker. SCR: Lenny Bruce. PROD: George Weiss. MUSIC: Charles Ruddy. DOP: W. Merle Connell. CAST: Timothy Farrell, Lenny Bruce, Honey Harlow, Sally Marr.
From the Grade Z mastermind of Robot Monster, Broadway Jungle and Cape Canaveral Monsters, this pulpy exposé film is best known for the casting of Lenny Bruce and his wife Honey Harlow, but actually they’re secondary characters. Lenny plays the henchman of the “dance hall”‘s gangster-owner, slapping around anyone who tries to double-cross this dubious entrepreneur. All things “Tucker-esque” are in abundance here: non-existent art direction (check out when customers want “to go to Hawaii”, which basically means having some crummy palm tree put in front of their table while a dance hall girl smooches with them; that’s the best set decoration in the entire film); badly overacted performances which go to the realm of baroquely cartoonish; impossibly dreary single-take medium-long shots in which you can view all the non-decor and the non-actors; and spare, washed-out cinematography only rivalled by Dreyer.
But also, Dance Hall Racket is perhaps Phil Tucker’s most structurally challenging film: not bad for a movie taking place entirely in a shabby set with three tables, a cramped generic office and a back alley (these limited locations also compliment the stagnant lives of their inhabitants). This “complex meta-narrative” operates on several planes at once. The time-old tradition of having a wraparound story is in effect here, as one detective explains to another that “shocking story” of all the crime and corruption in this dance hall, where we view scenes the detectives couldn’t possibly have known, much less been a part of. Despite the known presences of Bruce, Honey, and everyone’s favourite world-weary bad guy Timothy Farrell, there are really no major characters. Even the eccentric customers “wanting to go to Hawaii” take equal precedence. There is really no plot in this impressionistic study, despite the faint whispers of racketeering.
I’ve only ever seen this movie on the VHS offered by Something Weird, and that print more than a few times has some small scenes repeated. Evidently, the reels were mixed up and someone stopped it, put the right one on and kept going. But leaving these moments in adds another bizarre touch to the screwy narrative. It’s as confounding as anything by Alain Resnais.
(Since I originally wrote this review way back in 2000, Something Weird Video has since released it to DVD as a bonus feature to its “Tease And Please Double Feature” release, which features Dreamland Capers, along with Tucker’s other Lenny Bruce opus, Dream Follies. Alpha Video also features it as a bonus feature on its DVD release of Joe Sarno’s Sin You Sinners.)
