I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
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But as they say, that was then and this is now. Given Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Henry Kravis, Harry looks like a pretty puny shark in a big cesspool. And even if you manage to forget all the chiselers who have fleeced folks over the last quarter century, Harry even 26 years ago couldn’t have been much. Weidman depicts him as a sort of white-collar gangster with a mother fixation, a $35-a-week shipping clerk in a Bronx dress factory who, as his boss Mr. Pulvermacher dryly says, has “too much energy”–all of it negative. Harry, it seems, believes that life is a “cold cash proposition”–that you’re either a catcher or a pitcher, the dinner or the diner. He shouts, “Being poor killed my father, but it sure ain’t gonna kill me!” (Harry is the garment district’s answer to Scarlett O’Hara.)
Pursuing his evil destiny, Harry manages to trigger a deliverers’ strike so that he can break it by forming his own Needle Trade Delivery Service. From then on, the sewer’s the limit as this opportunistic Seventh Avenue shyster moves from delivering clothes to producing them, persuades a crack designer and salesman to quit Pulvermacher and invest in Harry’s Apex Modes, steals from the firm to lavish jewelry on a gold-digging show girl, and then tries to flimflam his creditors into thinking a too-trusting partner stole the funds.
Michael Sokoloff’s perfunctory choreography and James Dardenne’s too abstract set fail to dazzle, but Jessica Hahn’s sumptuously silly 50s costumes look as rich as even a Harry Bogen could desire.
