‘The Plot Against Harry,’ the tale of a Jewish gangster’s redemption, debuted 55 years ago today
A long-lost classic with multiple releases and rebirths, Michael Roemer’s film premiered in 1971.
Michael Roemer’s The Plot Against Harry is a movie of a specific time, even as its release was spread across several different decades. Filmed entirely in black and white, the film was shot in the late 1960s, opened briefly in the 1970s, had its first wide release in the late 1980s, showed at Cannes in the 1990s, and then got a highly-regarded restoration in the current decade.
Throughout, the film has slowly gained deserved prestige as a film about mid-century ideas of New York Jewish masculinity- a similar topic, albeit a very different movie, from Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, another movie that cast several nonprofessional actors in major roles.
I haven’t ever heard the Safdie brothers specifically check off The Plot Against Harry as an influence, although one essay declared that the film “anticipates the neurotic schlemiel picaresques of the Coen Brothers and Safdies by decades.”
When The Plot Against Harry begins, small-time Jewish gangster and numbers runner Harry Plotnick (Max Priest) has just been released from a long stint in prison, where we get the sense he was more bored by the mundane existence than anything else.
Once out, he finds that the New York he remembers no longer exists. Rival gangsters have mostly muscled him out of his territory, while his ex-wife and daughter are distant. He even finds he has another daughter he never knew about.
As the Film Forum description for the revival says, The Plot Against Harry is set in “a world of call girls, bar mitzvahs, lingerie fashion shows, Cuban-Chinese mobsters, subway parties, Mafia barbecues, dog training classes, Congressional hearings, and hotel pajama parties.”
Harry joins his ex-wife’s brother in the catering business, hosting lots of weddings and bar mitzvahs, although his past keeps coming back to haunt him. Also, he’s facing the possibility of health problems.
This doesn’t sound much like a comedy, but in reality, it is. Humor is infused throughout, mostly through absurdity. And by the end, Harry has achieved an unlikely, but earned redemption.
