Supposedly an effort by ABC to both get into feature filmmaking and create what could have been a backdoor pilot to a television series, Target: Harry is a limp spy romp through a couple of European locales. There are obvious influences floating all around the film that seem to be replacements for entertainment, but ultimately it's just something of an uninspiring genre exercise.
Harry Black (Vic Morrow) is an ex-con who flies tourists around on private flights and based in Monte Carlo. He gets hired by Jason Carlyle (Stanley Holloway) to transport him to Istanbul where Carlyle, without Harry's knowledge, is going to sell the plates for five pound notes to the underworld. When Carlyle ends up dead on the streets of Istanbul, without the plates, Harry ends up the center of a hunt for them with the police, represented by Lieutenant Duval (Cesar Romero), and the underworld, represented by two competing personalities, Diane Reed (Suzanne Pleshette) and Mosul (Victor Buono). There's also Carlyle's daughter, Ruth (Charlotte Rampling), he gets to deal with.
The basic story is pretty standard Hitchcockian, wrong-man stuff. The small musical motif that comes up from time to time is borderline plagiarizing the James Bond theme. Mosul is effectively Sydney Greenstreet's characters from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. This movie really does wear its influences on its sleeve. And they tend to be where the film is the most fun, especially Buono who knows exactly what he's doing, even imitating Greenstreet's verbal delivery.
However, Harry Black is largely just trapped in an adventure that's not that interesting. There's the requisite opaqueness to the mystery early on, but Harry's actual involvement is never that compelling. For instance, he's nowhere near Carlyle when he dies, so the suspicion that Duval has towards him, despite, you know, being a policeman in Monte Carlo and not Istanbul where the murder actually happened, never feels like any sort of threat. Harry ends up feeling like he's involved because he has nothing better to do.
Now, the better way to package this would be to have Carlyle die in Harry's arms, Carlyle fly away on his own, apologize directly to Ruth for what happened, and then go with Ruth to continue the adventure, protecting her while he tries to clear his name. Except, the two don't meet until about halfway through the film, and then she's gone moments later (in one of two scenes that Gene Corman directed to sex the film up). All this while Harry has no real reason to get involved at all.
The unraveling of the plot, the big action/adventure sequence that ends the film, has its charms, but it's largely an empty exercise in film mechanics. The best part of this is really Buono who has to lumber through everything while making wisecracks. It's amusing.
Making movies is hard work that requires many hours and a lot of concentration, but I'm getting the sensation now that Corman is putting in something like a minimum effort in this late stage of his directing career. It's not a huge surprise to me that he'd give up in a few years. He feels like he's just going through the motions, giving his professional effort and no more. The creative spark that marked his Poe cycle is done and dusted. Corman still isn't a bad filmmaker by any measure. He still gets decent performances, things look good, and there's a good clip to the action. However, the script is just generic without any good reason for our hero to be involved at all.
It's forgettable, uninspiring, and kind of just bland. However, it has its small moments.
