Dance Hall Racket

Gangster Umberto Scalli (Timothy Farrell) runs his criminal operations from the Scalli Dance Emporium, located near a California port. Merchant seamen smuggle diamonds to him, and he pays them for their efforts. Serving as Scalli's assistant is Vinnie (Lenny Bruce), a hotheaded young hood who's fast with a knife. Scalli has dance-hall girl Rose (Honey Harlow) "slip a mickey" into the drink of one of the seamen in order to lift his wallet. The sailor regains consciousness after being drugged, and accuses Rose of theft. His complaining is halted by Vinnie, who stabs him to death. Scalli talks to Vinnie, warning him about his rash behavior.

Scalli decides to throw a party for his ex-partner Victor Pappas, who has just exited prison. Scalli hopes to discover where Pappas has a quarter of a million in gold. In the meantime, the police have assigned an undercover agent, Charlie Edson, to Scalli's case. Edson disguises himself as a seaman and gets invited to the party for Pappas where various dance-hall regulars perform and Scalli gives Pappas a "gift" Rose, clad in a new fur coat. Vinnie becomes jealous and confronts Scalli, and shoots him to death. After the shooting, Vinnie takes Pappas with him as a hostage, but Vinnie is soon gunned down by Edson, who can now close the case of the dance hall racket.

DANCE HALL RACKET is a hell of a curio, in that it appears to have been scripted by Bruce as an intentionally campy B-budget gangster picture. Tucker, however, shot it in his trademark leaden style, thereby ensuring that it would be recognized as resolutely funny by later generations of cult-movie fans; one can only imagine the confusion it caused in contemporary audiences. Bruce also was lucky enough to be able to fashion the film as kind of a home movie: his wife Honey plays Rose, his mother Sally Marr appears as Maxine, and one assumes he knew Bernie Jones, the dialect comic who does a persistently awful turn as a Scandinavian named "Punchy." The only cast member who came with the production is the silky-voiced Farrell, who appeared in a number of films produced by George Weiss, including Ed Wood's legendary GLEN OR GLENDA (1953). Farrell actually played the Scalli character in other Weiss productions, each one exposing a so-called "racket" (PIN DOWN GIRLS aka RACKET GIRLS, THE DEVIL'S SLEEP).

Those who come to the film with a knowledge of Tucker's shlock masterwork ROBOT MONSTER will not be disappointed; since DANCE HALL RACKET is constructed of small episodes, Tucker takes care to leave a lot of "breathing room" between scenes. In fact, more than once the performers appear to be repeating their lines in order to accentuate what they've just said or done--the assumption being that they want to hasten the scene's close, and the cameraman had no notion of when to turn the camera off (the effect is a totally alienating one, pointing up the already stilted nature of the acting, while also giving the film a patent phoniness that would reappear years later in the more "arch" works of Andy Warhol). Often, the plot (such as it is), stops dead for a pointless (presumably entertaining) interlude: another bit of whimsy from "Punchy," a prolonged glimpse of the dance-hall patrons shuffling away, a catfight (between characters who haven't figured at all in the plot), and a Peeping Tom sequence set in the ladies' dressing room. The last-named bit of business seemingly belongs in the film, since one assumes that Weiss sold it to distributors as an exploitation outing, intended to stimulate male patrons; as it stands, however, there are only a few brief shots of women in lingerie, taking up no more than a minute or so of the film's running time.

The film's lasting interest, of course, centers around Bruce's participation. Though he had a great interest in the movies, and did a number of genre-spoof routines in his nightclub act, DANCE HALL RACKET remains his only onscreen appearance as an actor (he received scripting credit for the mainstream 1954 feature THE ROCKET MAN). The film can clearly be seen as a function of his concert work, since his performance as Vinnie is essentially composed of the same tough-guy voice and mannerisms he would adopt when referring to such characters in his act (usually in the context of speaking about the owners of the clubs in which he played). At points, it becomes evident that Bruce is having so much fun playing the role that the film is little more than a case of a comic playing dress-up.

Thus, critics who have faulted Bruce and company for giving awful performances missed the point entirely: the movie actually qualifies as one of the oddest pranks ever released as a feature film. DANCE HALL is indeed a home movie, one where only the central cast and the scripter were in on the joke. (Adult situations, violence.) leave a comment