The Trouble With Harry

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY         B+                 

USA  (99 mi)  1955  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except he was vertical.
—Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine)

A good old-fashioned murder mystery where the whodunit concerns are completely overshadowed by the embellished, personality-driven aspects of this autumnal theater piece set in the glorious fall colors of rural New England, where characterization supersedes all else, as the acerbic tone and blistering speed of the nonstop dialog feels like a tongue-in-cheek Hitchcockian take on an equally comic romp about concealed murders in Frank Capra’s equally enthralling ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944).  Hitchcock obviously loved morbid humor, where the colorful pastoral setting gives this an artificialized, storybook feel, where even the childlike stick drawings in the charming opening credit sequence by Saul Steinberg have a dark and particularly edgy “Once upon a time” appeal.  The opening shots resemble colorful pages of fall colors from a magazine, where every tree is exploding with a painterly appeal, where out of this pictorial bliss appears a dead body.  The film was a favorite of Hitchcock, but one of the few that actually lost money, becoming one of The Five Lost Hitchcocks, kept out of circulation for decades (thirty years for this film) because their rights were bought back by the director and willed to his daughter, eventually re-released in theaters in the mid 1980s.  Only his second comedy after MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), this is a film uncluttered by extraneous plot devices or unnecessary loose ends, but is instead a vivid character-driven account of events that take place one day in the lives of two couples, though they barely know one another at the start of the day, brought together by the presence of a corpse, where each initially has their own unique reaction to his death.  The truth of the matter is no one really cared that much for Harry, nor is anyone truly sorry to see him go.  Nonetheless, the poor guy gets ungraciously buried and dug up 4 or 5 times in a single day, each time with some new revelation about the effect his death will have on the participants. 

Introduced by the whimsical musical score of Bernard Herrmann (later used in a 2010 Volkswagen commercial), in his first of many Hitchcock collaborations, a young boy, Arnie (Jerry Mathers, soon to be Beaver Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver [1957 – 1963]), goes innocently playing in the woods with a toy gun in his hand, much like Little Red Riding Hood, only to be greeted by a corpse lying on the ground.  Simultaneously, Edmund Gwenn is retired sea Captain Albert Wiles, an elderly old coot with exaggerated autobiographical exploits who happens to be shooting for rabbits in the woods.  Seeing the dead man sprawled out on the ground, he naturally assumes he accidentally shot the man and thinks to bury him on the spot, but quickly hides when he hears others approaching, which include the likes of a wandering hobo who steals the shoes, a self-obsessed professor so engrossed with reading his book that he actually trips over the corpse but nonchalantly continues on his way, unconcerned, until the young boy returns with his mother Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine, goofy and brilliant in her first film appearance), who doesn’t seem the least bit sorry about a corpse that she recognizes as her dead husband.  The Captain narrates his thoughts out loud, as what he hoped he could secretly bury and quickly cover up from view was turning into a busy thoroughfare of pedestrians wandering through this precise patch of isolated woods, eventually joined and invited for elderberry tea by his eccentric neighbor, Mildred Natwick as Miss Ivy Gravely, an elderly spinster, and a local landscape painter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), who actually stops to help the Captain bury the corpse.  We quickly learn of budding romantic interests of both the elderly, with Gravely politely and flirtatiously serving tea and blueberry muffins, and the young couple, where Marlowe makes his intentions clear straightaway by forwardly confessing an interest in painting her nude, which leads to the unphased Jennifer changing the subject to her fresh batch of tart lemonade. 

The secret to the success of this witty and deliciously dark comedy is the quick pace of the highly impulsive chatterbox dialog and the warm charm of each of the characters, especially MacLaine, who has the kind of infectious, sensual spunk of a grown up Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), where the setting could just as easily be the cozy small town allure of Angela Lansbury’s Cabot Cove from Murder, She Wrote (1984 – 1996).  Among the more memorable scenes include MacLaine’s curiously detailed explanation of her past with Harry and his brother, also the four of them, like thieves in the night, carrying shovels as they continually walk back and forth into the woods to unearth the poor corpse once again, with a collective intent to keep Harry’s decidedly unpopular influence at a minimum, as who needs to notify the authorities, see their name dragged through the mud, and be forced to re-live this experience all over again?  Better to let bygones be bygones and let Harry sleep undisturbed.  But Harry simply won't stay in one place.  Watching them press and clean his oft buried clothes in order to keep the police from discovering any scent of their unscrupulous activities has an absurdly comical air of wiping their hands clean of any indecent or immoral activity, yet all along they plot like petty criminals how best to cover up their crimes.  This scatterbrained, screwball comedy was written by John Michael Hayes, adapted from a Jack Trevor Story novel.  Shot in Craftsbury, Vermont in late September 1954, nearly all the foliage was gone by the time the film crew arrived, necessitating leaves to actually be glued to the trees in order to create this colorful canvas of idealized perfection, and also, due to the incessant rain, several scenes were shot in a nearby school gymnasium, where a 500 pound camera attached to an elevated crane fell and just missed hitting the venerable director.  21 minutes into the film is Hitchcock’s signature appearance seen through the window of a general store walking past a parked Rolls Royce while an elderly man inspects roadside paintings for sale.  Using occasional racy dialog throughout that might sound more at home in a Marx Brothers movie, it’s curious the effect a corpse can have on an otherwise sleepy and safely protected community, each resorting to innocent white lies that only grow in epic proportion with their wildly active imaginations. 

Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS                                                        B                     

USA   (87 mi)  2011  d:  Miguel Arteta 

The title is a little misleading, as despite the supposed Iowa location, most of the characters come from other Midwest states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and even Nebraska, while the film itself was shot entirely in the state of Michigan.  While it’s not easy to wrap yourself around the semi-comatose happenings of a small town insurance convention, probably no place on earth one would rather not be, yet for all its attention to Midwestern detail, this film starts extremely slow but eventually finds a tailwind of crude comedy that’s actually pretty funny.  Ed Helms is perfectly cast as the ultra ordinary and socially awkward Tim Lippe, a conservative and near invisible mid 30’s insurance man covering the farm towns of Brown Valley, Wisconsin, a place where the world changes at a glacial pace, and where Tim’s once-a-week “pre-engagement” girlfriend is none other than his 7th grade science teacher (Sigourney Weaver).  After the strange death of their leading sales rep, the boss sends Tim to win the company’s coveted 2-Diamond Award, which they’ve won three years running, though Tim is strangely apprehensive, thinking the world is suddenly moving too fast.  His boss has confidence in him, but places extra pressure on him as he expects results.  Honestly, there’s nothing at this point to suggest it’d be a good idea to remain in the theater unless perhaps you’re Amish and you skipped school to see it.  But it’d be worth your patience.        

With little fanfare, Tim boards a plane for the first time in his life and heads for a thriving big city metropolis where he immediately lands in insurance convention nirvana, a place he describes as Barbados once he sees his first indoor swimming pool.  In order to save costs, he’s got two roommates, one is probably the first black man he’s even seen, Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Ronald, a polished, smooth talker whose voice alone has the calming assurance of a radio host, and finally, in a stroke of excessively bad taste, John C. Reilly as “Deanzie” Ziegler is the most obnoxious man on the planet and a man his boss specifically warned him to avoid, a guy who guzzles free booze like it’s candy and unleashes a barrage of crude, sexually offensive remarks that you can’t believe you just heard, turning everything into sexual innuendo, as if he’s an older and less successful version of one of Saturday Night Live’s “wild and crazy” guys, Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the world’s worst pickup artists on the loose.  And in perhaps her best role ever is Anne Heche, nearly unrecognizable as Joan, an outgoing girl, her married inhibitions unleashed as she’s out of town, who just wants to be one of the guys, except she’s flirtatious as hell.  Once the players have been introduced, they start drinking and loosening up (and did I mention there’s a scavenger hunt?), where little by little their inner souls, locked in a vice grip of their own hard corps conventionality, struggle to become liberated.  Major conflicts ensue. 

After leading the audience exactly where they think this is going, writer Phil Johnston sends them on an express train veering out of control, where Reilly’s humor actually becomes hysterical and the straight-laced Ed Helms becomes the bon vivant man about town, where his heartfelt earnestness turns him into a chick magnet, which all but knocks playboy Ziegler off his feet in admiration, immediately declaring him a best friend for life, even if he just got to know him.  The zaniness is crude, but appealing, as by the end of this picture, despite a series of setbacks and moments of extreme anguish and despair, a man constantly challenged by unforeseen forces, the perennially uptight Helms will try just about anything, as he’s at the end of his rope, yet his inner self is basically so admirable that the fun is seeing him get mixed up on a road journey with lowlifes and swindlers, all thinking he’s easy pickings, as he has to somehow navigate his way through this moral purgatory of lost souls.  It’s no less than a WIZARD OF OZ (1939) journey, as our everyman hero, with the help of his friends, is forced through his adventures, which include a rollicking ride with a friendly convention prostitute (Alia Shawkat), to re-evaluate what really matters in his own life and damn if there’s not a surge of Capra-esque emotion by the end of this picture—remarkable that something that started so predictably lame became so irreverently enjoyable by the end, continuing the bad jokes even over the end credits. 

The Naked Spur

THE NAKED SPUR              B+

USA (91 mi) 1953 d: Anthony Mann

Smart, compact, and honest, Anthony Mann developed a unique style of western, one that bonded man with nature, insisting that he shoot his westerns outdoors on location, but also accentuating the psychological dilemma of human flaws, where men are imperfect yet strive to overcome their weaknesses. Particularly in the West, where the focus of attention is on male individuality, it’s surprising what drives men to do what they do. That was never more apparent than in this film, taking the usually mild mannered James Stewart, forever characterized as homebody George Bailey in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), but also as the renowned Senator from Ford’s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962), and turning him into an ornery, highly embittered man who has been betrayed by a former fiancé who sold his land and ran off with another man while he fought for the Union in the Civil War. In the West, nothing showed weakness like being taken for a sucker by a woman. In order to buy his land back, he desperately becomes a bountry hunter, which means butting into other people’s business and routinely placing himself in harm’s way, a dangerous job most men aren’t cut out for, but Stewart is driven to get his land back, as if he is defined by what he owns, and until he gets it back, he’s a man ripped apart with something missing inside.

Shot by William Mellor in the extremely rugged mountainous terrain of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, this has a streamlined and experimental feel to it as the story unfolds with only five characters in the entire cast, Janet Leigh as the female companion of the outlaw, Robert Ryan, Millard Mitchell is an old gold prospector, a go along, get along kind of guy that Stewart happens upon, while Ralph Meeker plays a disgraced man in uniform carrying dishonorable discharge papers who just happened to hear gunshots, throwing himself into the middle of things without anyone asking for his help. The three take Ryan fairly easily as he’s out of ammunition, but only then do the associates realize there’s a $5000 reward to bring this man in dead or alive for shooting a U.S. Marshal. Stewart’s dreams go up in shambles at the thought of splitting the reward money, as a share is not enough to buy back his land, but he has little choice. Despite being shot outdoors in the wide open spaces, much of this plays out like a chamber drama, as this is a psychological study that begins to resemble THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), where the feeling of claustrophobia sets in on the long ride back to Kansas where they never leave each other’s sight, as the characters grow more protective of their merchandise, thinking of him as an investment, becoming ever more obsessed with their own personal greed, so much so they can’t get away from it, as they live with it night and day.

Stewart plays off-type in Anthony Mann westerns and here he’s angry most of the time, like he’s a clogged spigot about to burst, as he’s not too happy about the way things turned out, where instead of one he has to closely watch over four others at all times. In my view, he’s a little over the top, bordering on hysterical, not really in synch with the other four actors who feel much more relaxed within their characters, but then Stewart is carrying the picture, and his disappointment with himself is one of the keys to the story. Ryan, in particular, is extremely comfortable in his role as a bad guy with a smile, as he relishes in the idea of getting these guys all stirred up over the money, hoping they will eventually turn against one another, allowing him an opportunity to escape. Leigh has to straddle both worlds, as she’s loyal to Ryan, believing he’s innocent, as that’s what he kept telling her ahead of time, but she begins to suspect his real motives, becoming sympathetic to Stewart who has lost everything, a shattered man whose vulnerability makes him highly trustworthy. The climax of the film takes place at a high cliff and river location that resembles DELIVERANCE (1972), where the ferociousness of the rapids really are a threatening force, where the intensity of the river makes this a tense and gripping backdrop to the unraveling human drama.