MovieChat Forums > Last Exit to Brooklyn (1990) Discussion > What happened to Harry? (spoilers)

What happened to Harry? (spoilers)


Did he die from the beating? Was he humiliated from the neighborhood? You don't see him in the end when everybody goes back to work.

"Dance Like Nobody's Watching" -Bob Fosse
"You have to learn to be yourself...but on purpose."

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Like many of the other characters, his fate is unresolved, and it's left to the viewer to decide what may have ultimately happened to him.

By losing focus on the strike and by not keeping a tight rein on the union's finances, and instead by obsessing over his new-found sexuality, he essentially brought his misfortune on himself. In the context of the movie, he just faded from view after that last brutal assault.

That is simply my own take on it, others may disagree. To speculate further, I think he probably did not survive for much longer afterward, as he didn't seem to have the strength of character to straighten his priorities out.

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That's very good, thank you. I can see you're a fellow writer.

"Dance Like Nobody's Watching" -Bob Fosse
"You have to learn to be yourself...but on purpose."

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It's possible that Harry Black died from the beating, although the book implies that he survives, albeit with nearly every bone in his body broken.

Most likely, once he recovered from his injuries, if word got out about his homosexuality and (worse still) his attempted sexual assault on a minor, he would probably lose his job and union membership, his family (not that he cared about the latter), and would become a permanent pariah in his blue collar Brooklyn community.

Harry didn't seem like the sort to have the mental resources to find a new and better life somewhere else, so in all likelihood he just drank himself to death in a gutter shortly after.

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Just speaking very technically, the way he was "crucified" by being suspended with his arms up, given that he's been given terrible debilitating wounds to his arms, shoulders, torso, it's very possible he could've died from being placed in that position (assuming the wounds themselves were not fatal). That's how crucifixion victims died; they became so weak they could not raise their diaphragm to breathe and asphyxiated. Then again, this is a crowded area of Brooklyn; perhaps someone took him down.

Given the way the director framed him as being "crucified" and given the horrific depiction of his wounds, I assumed he did die, although of course there's no mention of this either way.

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By the by, the crucifixion is foreshadowed when he's hanging off the factory's fence, yelling at the scabs. Clever clever.

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That area was abonadoned. He was a gonner, fuggetttaboutit

Spoiler alert for them spoil sports out there! Y'all like spoiled milk, stop crying over it!

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