Michael Roemer’s neglected masterpiece about New York Jewish gangsters makes absurdity eerily plausible.
Michael Roemer’s second professional feature, “The Plot Against Harry,” from 1969, should have become an instant classic—of American Jewish cinema, of gangster movies, of film comedy, and of bold creativity on a low budget. Instead, it failed to find distribution, went unreleased, and was written off as a loss by its producers. The movie languished essentially in Roemer’s closet until he showed it around, two decades later.
Harry’s troubles are not limited to the gambling business. The complications of his family life soon become even more labyrinthine. First, his sister Mae , from whom he has successfully hidden his criminal life, comes to town. She quickly imposes a raft of social obligations on Harry, forcing him into a rope dance of lies and ruses and evasions. “Half the kids on the block, they went to jail; not Harry,” she boasts to friends.
The breathless rush of action is brought to life with a teeming cast of clamorous characters who infuse frame after frame with hectic energy. Roemer unleashes his lurching panoply of dramatic incidents in a rapid succession of scenes with no breathing room between them. The result is like a piece of music with the rests taken out, one phrase crashing into the still echoing previous one, producing a nerve-jangling cluster of dissonances.
The obvious artistic forebear of Roemer’s realistic depiction of one man’s nightmare scenario—the sense that the universe is indeed plotting against Harry—is, of course, Kafka. But Roemer extends the Kafkaesque tone by way of subtraction; what he subtracts is the divine. Harry may seem like God’s schlimazel, but his Job-like misfortunes are the jokes of a God who doesn’t exist, and Roemer, in his depiction of Harry’s Jewish world, shows what takes His place: folklore and community.
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