Friday's Old Fashioned: The Plot Against Harry (1989)

The sports blogger Joe Posnanski gave Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix Pop Tart movie “Unfrosted” a withering review by simply saying that in watching it, he did not laugh a single time. I, myself, am not immune to watching a movie to catalogue how many times I laugh, but it’s also true that the number of chuckles does not necessarily correlate to a comedy movie being funny. “The Plot Against Harry” was filmed in 1969 but not released until 1989, failing to score distribution in the intervening 20 years because according to writer and director and producer Michael Roemer, it was a (black) comedy that didn’t make anyone laugh. Having now finally watched it myself all these years later, I can say that’s not exactly true; I laughed out loud two, maybe three, times. But that lack of LOLs doesn’t mean it lacks humor. On the contrary, it is a definitive example of bureaucratic and claustrophobic Kafkaesque comedy best meant for when you are standing at the gallows, shrugging by force of circumstance more than guffawing. When small-time Jewish crook Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) runs into his ex-wife (Kay Woods) and grown daughter (Sandra Kazan), whom he has not seen in years, he literally runs into them out of a fit of road rage. And when his ex-wife walks toward the camera and right into a straight-on shot, the neon sign illuminated in the background seeming to place her on a virtual Catskills stage, and says, “I know you’d always be the death of me, Harry,” it’s the sort of laugh that emanates instead as a gob smacked “Woah.”

There is, of course, no plot against Harry, the movie’s biggest joke built right into its title and immediately alluding to how so much of its humor is sort of running on a track parallel to everything else. “The Plot Against Harry” begins with Harry released from jail and seeking to get his hooks right back into the underworld, only to find that so many of the people folded into his previous organization have moved on. He tries to flex a little muscle, but Priest’s performance makes this flexing feel a little more like kvetching. His sister Mae (Ellen Herbert) has no idea about his real business was to begin with, and so when we see him wearing a robe and slippers in a hotel, eating a fancy dinner, cavorting with a call girl, only for an unwitting Mae to show up, it feels like he’s play-acting on two different levels, rendering his plight that much more pitiful. When Harry implores his chauffeur Max (Henry Nemo) to burn the books since they are full of incriminations, Max winds up setting off the smoke detectors instead. That brings trouble because Harry is trying to go straight in his ex-brother-in-law’s (Ben Lang) catering business, only to wind up being called to testify on television before a senate committee and go on a radio show but offer little more than a bromide about kids should not do crime. That was one of the moments I literally LOLd.

The presentation of this scene is not exactly surreal, but it feels that way, nevertheless, a moment when you virtually look around and wonder, “How did we end up here, exactly?” That’s Roemer’s niftiest trick, making a movie rife with plot and convolutions never feel complicated or convoluted. Given its gambling and Jewish undertones, it invites comparisons to “Uncut Gems” (2019), but if “Uncut Gems” downshifted and felt less like a frantic nightmare than an indolent daydream. To stretch that comparison even further, Adam Sandler’s character came across like the consummate compulsive gambler, no matter how much the walls had closed in, convinced he was one bet away from it all breaking his way. In the eternally dyspeptic facial expression of Priest, his eyes seeming to get baggier by the scene, Harry becomes the spiritual opposite, convinced nothing will go right, which makes it that much droller when, by the end, it sort of does.