Rejected by confused Columbia Pictures execs in 1970, Michael Roemer’s The Plot Against Harry spent two decades lying in wait before being resurrected to great acclaim—and becoming a selection of the 1989 New York Film Festival. Small-time Jewish racketeer Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) is freshly released from prison to find his barely legitimate business struggling to keep afloat. Roemer’s film features a priceless cast, deadpan sense of humor, and and a wonderful sad-sack turn by Priest, while capturing a lost world of the Bronx in the mid-Sixties: call girls, maudlin suburbanites, Mafioso street toughs, bar mitzvahs, and all.

Photo courtesy of KING SCREEN PRODUCTIONS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION.