Union City (film) - Plot

Plot

Harlan (Lipscomb) is a repressed, uptight accountant living in an appartment block with his beautiful, neglected wife Lillian (Harry). He becomes obsessed with discovering who is drinking from the bottles left outside his appartment every morning and devises a series of ever-more complex traps and alarm systems, eventually finding the culprit to be a homeless war veteran (Sam McMurray). The vagrant apologises but the obsessive Harlan attacks him, knocking him down and seemingly cracking his skull. In a panic he hides the body behind the folding bed in another vacant appartment opposite his own.

Harlan's behaviour becomes ever more irrational, driving Lillian away from him and into the arms of building supervisor Larry Longacre (McGill); he believes another deranged resident known as the Contessa (Irina Maleeva) is planning to run away with him and puts potential residents off the room where he hid the vagrant's body with his bizarre behaviour.

However, eventually a young couple of newly-weds, Alphonse (Tony Azito) and Jeanette (Pat Benatar) Flourescu move in. Harlan attempts to dissaude Alphonse from opening the bed but is unsuccessful. Alphonse looks at the bloody but empty bed as a terrified Harlan throws himself through the appartment to his death on the street below. A crowd gathers around his body, watched briefly by the disinterested vagrant, alive with his head bandaged.