Back in 1969, filmmaker Michael Roemer, who had a success a few years earlier with the drama Nothing but a Man, made a decidedly low-key comedy about a low-level Jewish gangster, just released from a stint in prison, trying to work his way back into a life where he has long since lost whatever meager position of power he had accumulated before his arrest and into a family that has mostly washed their hands of him. Alas, the film, entitled The Plot Against Harry, was apparently so low-key that the few viewers it managed to attract didn’t quite realize it was meant to be a comedy and after a one-week run in a Seattle theatre in 1971, it essentially vanished from view. In 1989, Roemer was having his films transferred to video and discovered that the guy running the transfer was laughing throughout when doing The Plot Against Harry. Taking a shot that times had caught up with the film, he submitted it to the Toronto, New York and Sundance film festivals on a whim and was accepted by all three. Not only did it play like gangbusters in those settings, the screenings generated enough interest to garner it the full theatrical release it had been denied two decades earlier and it became a decent-sized hit in 1990 on the art-house circuit during the early days of the boom in American independent cinema.
Now The Plot Against Harry is returning once again to theaters in a newly restored version and it is just as delightfully droll and inspired as it has clearly always been. The closest way I can think to describe it is to imagine what Carlito’s Way might have been like if it had been rewritten by Alan King. Watching antihero Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) as he helplessly observes his former cohorts making off with his business (they don’t even have the courtesy to attempt to rub him out—they just ignore them as if he no longer exists, which is pretty much the case) and attempts to regain his standing with his estranged family and the world at large by throwing money he doesn’t really have at his problems is so funny, inspired and observant that it makes you wonder once again what viewers back in 1970 must have been thinking when they responded so negatively to the film.
That said, what really makes the film work is that Roemer doesn’t treat Harry just as a walking punchline and he and Priest make him into a genuinely interesting and sympathetic character throughout and his scenes with former brother-in-law Leo (Ben Lang), who is trying to make Harry look good in order to bring him in as a partner in his synagogue-run catering business are particularly smart and observant, as are his interactions with loyal chauffeur/bookkeeper Max (Henry Nemo). The film even has a couple of scenes that by all rights deserve to be considered as classics of comedic cinema—one in which Harry nervously testifies before a crime commission that quickly surmises that he has nothing of value to give them and the big climax in which, having already been informed after a medical scare that he has an enlarged heart, he is convinced that he is suffering from a potentially fatal heart attack while backstage at a telethon and makes a final noble gesture that goes about as well as everything else in his life.
I first saw The Plot Against Harry during its 1990 re-release and thought it was a wonderfully funny film. Now that I have seen it again, I think I liked it even better this time around—Roemer displays a brilliant comedic sensibility that hasn’t aged a day and the film also now serves as a fascinating time capsule of what was going on the the streets of New York City during the shift from the 60s to the 70s. I concede that the measured pacing employed by Roemer may seem a tad slow for modern sensibilities and that the idea of watching an obscure black-and-white film starring a bunch of unknowns may not sound that appealing to others. However, the final film still works so well that any objections along those lines will evaporate after a few minutes. Having previously gone down in the books as one of the funniest films of 1970 (even if no one realized it at the time) and 1990, The Plot Against Harry proves to be one of the best comedies that you will see this year as well.