The Plot Against Harry

Harry Plotnick is a small-time Jewish numbers racketeer. Released from prison, he finds his world turned upside down. Blacks and Latinos have successfully moved into his neighborhood gambling circuit. While Harry halfheartedly attempts to resume his life of call girls and gambling, his long-lost brother-in-law and the rest of the family cajole him into a partnership in a legit kosher catering business. As this hilarious story unfolds, we find that the "plot" against Harry involves his unwitting transformation from a schlemiel to a mensch. Shot on location in New York in 1969 but released only in 1989, this film has the feel of a freshly opened time capsule. With fabulous hair-dos, big cars, a lingerie fashion show, an initiation into the "Mystic Knights of the Sojourners Lodge," and a "Have-A-Heart Telethon," THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY has to be one of the funniest satires of American Jewish life we have seen.

Michael Roemer was born in Berlin and spent the war years at a school for refugees in England. He came to the U.S. in 1945 and attended Harvard, where, in 1947, he made A TOUCH OF THE TIMES, a comedy-fantasy about kite flying, which is possibly the first feature-length film produced at an American college. From 1949 to 1957, Roemer worked for producer Louis de Rochement as a writer, production manager and assistant director on CINERAMA HOLIDAY and WINDJAMMER, as well as on numerous documentaries. From 1958 to 1961, Roemer produced twelve films for the Ford Foundation with the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespearean Festival Company. Roemer also produced and directed six films for the National Science Foundation, and 68 films for the Heath Publishing Company, all of which were widely shown on public television. During this time, he also wrote film reviews for THE REPORTER. In 1962, Roemer began an eight-year partnership with his Harvard classmate Robert Young, co-producer and cinematographer of THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY, who had worked with him on A TOUCH OF THE TIMES. Their first collaboration was CORTILE CASCINO, a documentary about poverty in Palermo, which the sponsoring network, NBC, refused to air. They then co-wrote and co-produced NOTHING BUT A MAN, which Roemer directed and Young photographed. This film about blacks in the South, which starred Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, won two prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1964. Roemer and Young's next project, FACES OF ISRAEL (1967), a documentary for public television, was nominated for an Emmy Award. After THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY, which was completed in 1969, Roemer became a Professor of Film and American Studies at Yale University, a position he still holds. He has published essays in Film Quarterly and the Yale Review, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He directed the highly-accaimed feature-ltngth documentary, DYING (1976), aired by PBS and winner of many prizes. Roemer also wrote and directed two films for American Playhouse: FILGRIM, FAREWELL (1980), with Elizabeth Huddle and Christopher Lloyd, which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival; and HAUNTED (1984), with Brooke Adams and Trish van de Vere, which was shown at the Berlin Film Festival.