If you simply relay the plot, The Trouble With Harry [1955] comes across as your usual Hitchcock, as it is centered around a corpse. This time, however, the corpse is Hitchcock's excuse for comedy as much as it for intrigue. Typical for Hitchcock most of the intrigue is sexual. Atypical of Hitchcock, potential violence isn't stirring within the plot. Instead, the violence happens prior to the story beginning, and the story mostly follows its characters as they do their best to forget the violence — mainly in their haste to do the hanky-panky.
Violence doesn't disrupt the lives of the characters in The Trouble With Harry; they absent-mindedly stumble over it. Ol’ Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is trudging through the forest of a quaint little Vermont country town one day, musing aloud over the ways of the Hunt, himself having had nary a piece of luck hunting rabbit. He suddenly stumbles across a body, and curses his luck, taking it to be the product of his own careless shooting. But Wiles' luck picks up — enter Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick), a homely middle-aged woman, who comes across the Captain dragging the body to burial, only to invite the Captain to tea later that afternoon. Gravely then goes on her way.
Soon after, the Captain has to hide in the bushes as others stumble across the body — the twice-widowed mom Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) who happily identifies the body as Harry and self-styled artist/genius Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) who inadvertently draws the body into a landscape.
Before you know it, everybody’s got trouble with Harry, mostly because he has inconvenienced their pursuits of each other. Newly coupled Miss Gravely and Captain Wiles, and Jennifer and Sam, can hardly wait to hit the sack. It’s only that knowledge of Harry’s corpse — and their perceived complicity in his death — that impedes the speed at which they can get at it and the ensuing absurdity makes for the comedy.
Again and again, for a new reason each time, Harry gets buried, unburied, forgotten, remembered, and otherwise abused. The charm of the film is that, even with all this disrespect of the dead, it’s nearly as quaint and innocent as the Vermont town in which it's set (not to mention a pre-Beaver Jerry Mathers as Jennifer's son). Maybe it's the 1955 release date; the socially imposed sexual repression of the era could be the key to the success of Hitchcock’s sex comedy, because the restraint leaves the sex implied, as is the violence. This makes the characters' conspiracy against the law all the more cute, as cute as your standard romantic comedy.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Hitchcock is the master film-maker and story-teller. You guys are on the right track and should be studying all his films from the early silents on. There are far too many masterpieces for one director . Sadly, The Trouble With Harry wasn't one of them.
I have tried it a few times and it always is ok for a movie; terrible for a Hitchcock. There weren't very many that didn't make it. David Selznick put his heavy hand on a couple and kept them from the same flights of genius as Sabotage, Saboteur, Blackmail, Notorious, Spellbound, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North By Northwest and, can you believe it, even more that can be seen over and over again.
Hitchcock succeeds because he always throws some humor our way just when it is needed. But he couldn't make a comedy. His timing is wonderful for suspense or even horror. (Psycho is successful at what it does by it has freaked me out since it came out and I saw it at age 12. But for a comedy film I don't think he could do it.
After all that, you wrote a good enough review that it is time for me to see it over again and re-think my whole comment above.