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.