Harry Plotnick seul contre tous

This movie is a gem. In plot, scripting, acting and direction, there is wit and verisimilitude. It's a favorite of mine that deserves to be more widely known.

The 'hero' is a small time numbers runner who returns home after a stretch in prison to find lots of changes on the 'job' and at home. His life becomes more and more complicated as he copes with his new life. There's a clever ending.

I give it 'only' 9 of 10 only because it's not 'a 100 best of all time' film. Still, it's one of my favorites. I saw it once on its release, and spent a lot of time tracking it down for a second view. The effort was worth it.

Here's something new: a little B/W film with no stars, about a middle-aged Jewish ex-gangster who wants to go into the catering business --AND it's not "Hollywood sit-com cute"! It's understandable that with all of that going 'against' it, no one wanted to release this film back in 1970. Luckily, director Martin Roemer never underestimated the richness of his film. Twenty years after being turned down by Hollywood, he decided to try the independent festival circuit and there, he found his audience.

The plot against Harry Plotnick is basically his own conscience and paranoia working against him. He'd left a good marriage unaware that his wife was pregnant at the time, not that it probably would have made a big difference to him back then. He was obsessed with the numbers racket, where he made a fair amount of money but ultimately spent a fair amount of time in prison, only to discover upon his release that the rackets had been taken over by various minorities. Now Harry is beginning to see the signs that it's time to make good with his conscience, with his family and with God. Not an easy feat!

This film is a wonderful glimpse into the kind of independent cinema that was around during the early seventies. It's 'early John Cassavetes meets early Woody Allen'. Unlike THE FRENCH CONNECTION or MEAN STREETS, both good films that depicted very specific worlds within Manhattan at that time, this film opens up a whole variety of worlds. Thus it steers free of cliches, no matter how deep it goes into the ethnic backgrounds of its characters. People are just people. Not all good or all bad. This film is like a breath of fresh air compared to the ultra-hip indie films of today. It's effortless, humorous, poignant, and an extremely enjoyable time capsule of the recent past.

The Plot Against Harry is an extraordinary, forgotten film that pops up from time to time in revival houses and late night television and is not to be missed. It's as if Scorcese did comedy - a great slice of criminal life and the true criminal mind - very reminiscent of today's "Sopranos" on HBO.

If there were such a thing as a Jewish New Wave film movement in the late 60's, director Michael Roemer would certainly have been in its vanguard. His long lost, low budget comedy about a strictly small time New York City crook readjusting to life after a nine month prison stretch recalls some of the stylistic freedom of early Truffaut, while at the same time anticipating by two decades the deadpan anti-plot devices of Jim Jarmusch. In place of a story it offers a number of grotesque, eccentric characters, all bouncing off each other in unpredictable and unlikely places: a lingerie show, a dog obedience school, a bar mitzvah, and so forth. What the film lacks is enough substance to justify the overwhelming praise that greeted its belated release in 1989; it's fun, but at the same time it's also a negligible experience. The story behind the film is actually more interesting than the film itself, and after twenty years all the tardy attention probably benefited Roemer more than the movie-going public.

If Diane Arbus made a comedy from a script by Ernest Lehman and Cliffford Odets, the result would LOOK a lot like The Plot Against Harry. This is an icy-hearted comedy with scarcely a normal-looking human being in sight. Nearly everyone is some sort of New York Jewish grotesque. And yet there are dribs and drabs of sympathetic characterization throughout, as well as a fascinating and broad sociological survey of a range of urban types. We move easily from gangster-limo to garmento fashion-show, to a heart-charity telethon where an impossibly bland crooner entertains on the improbably shoddy set of a TV studio. By the end, you're rooting for Harry, a small-time hood with the personality of a pickled whitefish. This movie is one of my all-time favorites.