Target: Harry

I watched Target: Harry because I thought it was a type of James Bond spy movie starring Cesar Romero as the "M" character. While that turned out to be true, Cesar was only in about fifteen minutes the movie. He's in the first ten minutes, luring unsuspecting audience members like me in. Then, we hang in there for the next hour, hoping in vain to see him again.

The bulk of the movie is extremely cheesy. "I'll buy that." "You can't afford it," she quips back. It's all very 1970s tv-movie-ish. Lots of zooms, lots of unrealistic, supposedly clever dialogue, and a huge rip-off of the James Bond theme. Vic Morrow is the too-cool-for-school lead who can't be bothered to care about anything. Suzanne Pleshette is his love interest who can't be trusted. Victor Buono is the bad guy. There's not much else to know, really, but you'll see some familiar faces as well: Stanley Holloway, Michael Ansara, and Charlotte Rampling as a blonde. I don't really recommend this one.

Supposedly an effort by ABC to both get into feature filmmaking and create what could have been a backdoor pilot to a television series, Target: Harry is a limp spy romp through a couple of European locales. There are obvious influences floating all around the film that seem to be replacements for entertainment, but ultimately it's just something of an uninspiring genre exercise.

Harry Black (Vic Morrow) is an ex-con who flies tourists around on private flights and based in Monte Carlo. He gets hired by Jason Carlyle (Stanley Holloway) to transport him to Istanbul where Carlyle, without Harry's knowledge, is going to sell the plates for five pound notes to the underworld. When Carlyle ends up dead on the streets of Istanbul, without the plates, Harry ends up the center of a hunt for them with the police, represented by Lieutenant Duval (Cesar Romero), and the underworld, represented by two competing personalities, Diane Reed (Suzanne Pleshette) and Mosul (Victor Buono). There's also Carlyle's daughter, Ruth (Charlotte Rampling), he gets to deal with.

The basic story is pretty standard Hitchcockian, wrong-man stuff. The small musical motif that comes up from time to time is borderline plagiarizing the James Bond theme. Mosul is effectively Sydney Greenstreet's characters from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. This movie really does wear its influences on its sleeve. And they tend to be where the film is the most fun, especially Buono who knows exactly what he's doing, even imitating Greenstreet's verbal delivery.

However, Harry Black is largely just trapped in an adventure that's not that interesting. There's the requisite opaqueness to the mystery early on, but Harry's actual involvement is never that compelling. For instance, he's nowhere near Carlyle when he dies, so the suspicion that Duval has towards him, despite, you know, being a policeman in Monte Carlo and not Istanbul where the murder actually happened, never feels like any sort of threat. Harry ends up feeling like he's involved because he has nothing better to do.

Now, the better way to package this would be to have Carlyle die in Harry's arms, Carlyle fly away on his own, apologize directly to Ruth for what happened, and then go with Ruth to continue the adventure, protecting her while he tries to clear his name. Except, the two don't meet until about halfway through the film, and then she's gone moments later (in one of two scenes that Gene Corman directed to sex the film up). All this while Harry has no real reason to get involved at all.

The unraveling of the plot, the big action/adventure sequence that ends the film, has its charms, but it's largely an empty exercise in film mechanics. The best part of this is really Buono who has to lumber through everything while making wisecracks. It's amusing.

Making movies is hard work that requires many hours and a lot of concentration, but I'm getting the sensation now that Corman is putting in something like a minimum effort in this late stage of his directing career. It's not a huge surprise to me that he'd give up in a few years. He feels like he's just going through the motions, giving his professional effort and no more. The creative spark that marked his Poe cycle is done and dusted. Corman still isn't a bad filmmaker by any measure. He still gets decent performances, things look good, and there's a good clip to the action. However, the script is just generic without any good reason for our hero to be involved at all.

It's forgettable, uninspiring, and kind of just bland. However, it has its small moments.

Roger Corman had successfully directed an "A" movie in 1967, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre", but he reverted to his much-lauded quickie movie roots for "Target: Harry", an ABC-TV pilot/telefilm that boasts a very fine cast but plays as flat as a pancake. It's a shame.

Watching it so many decades later was like sitting in a screening room watching an assemblage of film dailies: lots of background shots, listless reverse-shots' conversations (edited by Monte Hellman, who apparently had not much material to work with) and evident guerrilla filmmaking (extras staring toward the camera, no film permits obtained for a shoot) that reminded me of a couple of my favorite indie directors of the time, like Larry Cohen and Fred Williamson. The footage was lifeless, and if it had been a major film studio project I suspect Corman would have been fired and replaced (as later happened with Cohen on "I, The Jury") after a week or so.

The actors are pros, and even though at times he seems to be acting under protest, Vic Morrow is believable as our no-nonsense tough guy hero, the type (like Mitchum) that might get into bar fights with "fans" anxious to pick an argument with him. Supporting cast on paper is A-List, but only Victor Buono, too obviously styled as an imitation of Sydney Greenstreet, seems alive. The fault is not all Corman's - a screenplay by hack Bob Barbash is completely uninteresting throughout.

Harry Black (Vic Morrow) is a pilot that transports Jason Carlyle to a racing event in Instanbul. Soon Jason is shot and Harry ends in prison because they thought he killed Jason. However Harry is freed from prison by Lieutenant George Duval (Cesar Romero) for recovering the stolen plates that were possessed by Carlyle, and most of the movie consists of Harry that is chased, shot at and beaten to a pulp while trying to look cool.

I seeked this film because of the colorful cast (Morrow, Romero, Stanley Holloway, Michael Ansara, Victor Buono and Suzanne Pleshette) and also because it's directed by Roger Corman (a director that has some sort of cult following). In the first part it looked good but after it looked like it took a detour to laziness, and there was a scene that kinda scared me; a goon enters Ruth Carlyle (Charlotte Rampling)'s apartment and he squeezes her head to the point we hear her skull cracking! If you can overlook this, it's just a time passer.

Director Roger Corman once said about "Target: Harry" that it was a TV-movie before there was such a thing. Financed by the ABC Broadcasting Company, it may have been meant for television, though it was mostly seen in overseas markets with two new (and nude!) scenes added by producer Gene Corman: a sex scene 6mns in and the murder of a topless woman. Vic Morrow is cagey as Harry Black, a pilot sprung from jail in Monte Carlo who is hired to fly a British businessman to Istanbul. His client is murdered upon arrival because of what's not in his possession: currency plates for counterfeiting, stolen from the Royal Bank of London. The film has some good things in it, particularly Victor Buono as nefarious Mosul Rashi (Morrow and Buono make quite a team later in the film), and Suzanne Pleshette as a super-cool mystery lady who keeps popping up in crowds and hotel rooms. There's an exciting (if improbable) prison break, followed by a shoot-out amongst the Turkish ruins, but the effort seems pasted together. Too bad, Morrow holds his own as a latter-day Bogie wannabe. ** from ****