31 FRIDAY AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE: THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (PBS, 9-10:30 p.m.) Perhaps you remember the background of this film: Shot in 1969 by director Michael Roemer, The Plot Against Harry was never seen theatrically until 20 years later, when it opened in a limited release to great acclaim. Now American Playhouse brings this amiably eccentric film to a wider audience. It's about, as one character describes him, ''a two-bit racketeer,'' Harry Plotnik (Martin Priest). Harry is just out of prison and tired of the extortion racket-he'd like to go straight, but no one will give him a break. The movie is a shaggy-dog story about Harry's attempts to find something else to do with his life. Harry is almost literally offbeat: The movie has unexpected rhythms-one scene will bump along until it begins to seem improvised; the next will cut off before it seems finished. Filmed in black and white by Robert M. Young, who went on to direct movies such as Dominick & Eugene and Short Eyes, Harry is a marvelous time capsule of '50s New York, with vivid scenes filmed in barbershops, subway stations-even a dog obedience class. The Plot Against Harry is a gentle comedy-it doesn't have conventional jokes or big laughs; its humor derives from the deadpan face of Priest, whose sleepy-eyed stoicism crosses Buster Keaton with Lenny Bruce. B+ -KT
BABY GIRL SCOTT (CBS, 9-11 p.m.) John Lithgow and Mary Beth Hurt star in this 1987 TV tearjerker about a couple who give birth to a premature and severely disabled infant.
THE BEST OF THE KIDS IN THE HALL-PART ONE (HBO, midnight-12:30 a.m.) Some of the best skits of the season-including Buddy Cole coaching a lesbian softball team, confessions of a bad doctor, and the best-looking man in the world.
2 SUNDAY
THE GREEN MAN (A&E, 8-11 p.m.) This coproduction of the Arts & Entertainment network and the BBC is a three-hour oddity, an engaging combination of farce, thriller, and drama. The title has a couple of meanings: In England, ''the green man'' is a scary creature, a bogeyman; in this story, it's also the name of a 17th-century inn run these days by Maurice Allington. He's played by Albert Finney as a hearty, boisterous fellow always ready to joke with the guests, bellow at the staff, and take a nip of the cooking sherry. There's a reason he drinks too much: Maurice keeps seeing 300-year-old ghosts-spirits of the original inhabitants of the Green Man. This rattles Finney's Maurice so much that it's causing trouble with his marriage; his wife, Joyce (Linda Marlowe), thinks he's having delirium tremens. It's also playing havoc with Maurice's affair with his best friend's wife (Sarah Berger). Our distracted hero can't keep his mind on all the duplicitous details necessary to conduct a successful tryst. The Green Man is a 1969 Kingsley Amis novel adapted for TV by Malcolm Bradbury, no mean novelist himself (The History Man, Eating People Is Wrong). Bradbury has turned the book into a spookier version of Fawlty Towers, with Finney the harried innkeeper running down hotel halls either to escape from ghosts or to rendezvous with his lover. As The Green Man proceeds, it turns darker, more disturbing-Maurice seems in danger of losing his mind. This is in keeping with Amis' book, but it damages the TV movie, which loses much of the satirical (and satyrical) edge that makes the first two hours such an amusing romp. Finney, though, is wonderful, giving a full-bore performance that makes you wish he had star film roles more often. B+ -KT
