The Trouble with Harry (1955)

In a way, Alfred Hitchcock making a dark comedy makes perfect sense -his movies have dead bodies AND clever dialogue. Why not make a movie about both of them?

To be fair, "The Trouble With Harry" is nowhere near Hitchcock's best work, mainly because the central story is very repetitive. But it's kept aloft with Hitchcock's clever dialogue ("Marriage is a good way to spend the winter") and a cast of likably quirky characters who end up spending a few days trying to hide/excavate a dead body. How did you spend YOUR weekend?

Kindly old Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is out hunting rabbits when he finds the body of a dead man, whom he assumes he killed by accident. Free-spirited artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) comes across Wiles dragging the corpse through the woods, and offers to help him bury the corpse -at least, once they find out what the connection to the perky widow Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) is.

However, the whole scenario gets even more muddled when both Mrs. Rogers and kindly Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) claim to have accidentally killed the corpse (aka, Harry). The entire situation becomes even more problematic as they try to figure out what to do with Harry, especially with the suspicious Deputy Sheriff Wiggs (Royal Dano) breathing down their necks.

The trouble with "Trouble" is simple: most of the movie consists of the same few jokes, repeated for different people. People keep claiming they killed Harry accidentally, the body is dug up, the body is reburied, and everybody (except Sam) worries about what to do. That's most of the middle of the movie, summed up in a single sentence.

So it's a testament to Alfred Hitchcock's skill that this relatively lightweight movie is still pretty diverting. Most of that is because the dialogue is just so funny and clever, with lots of snappy lines ("We had a fireman on board who hit his head on a brick wall and died two days later." "Where did he find a brick wall on board a ship?").

He never plays the whole corpse angle for too many/few laughs -there isn't any slapstick or gross-out humor, and only one real visual gag (hello, bathtub!). No, the humor comes from the tart, slightly snarky way it's handled.

This is also the closest thing to a romantic comedy that Hitchcock ever made, because the subplots are all about how finding Harry's corpse has brought romance into the lives of Wiles, Sam, Jennifer and Miss Gravely. It's a rather charming focus, and between the wink-wink-nudge-nudge dialogue and flirting, it's pretty entertaining.

Admittedly none of the roles are very demanding, but the actors all do excellent jobs with them -Gwenn and Natwick play a pair of late-in-life lovers who are brought together by the discovery of a corpse. Forsythe provides a lot of the quirky humor in this movie as an artist who doesn't seem to have any idea of societal conventions, and he has decent chemistry with an elfin Shirley MacLaine (who seems similarly unconventional.

"The Trouble With Harry" is one of Hitchcock's weaker films plotwise, but it's still a fluffy, fun little diversion. Any comedy with an ambiguous wandering corpse is worth checking out.

Most Hitchcock movie plots center around things like murder, espionage, fear, and terror; The Trouble With Harry is a very different sort of Hitchcock film. Yes, there's been a murder, or at least a body, but the body in question is really more of an annoyance than it is a mystery to be solved. There's a bit of a confusion over how Harry died, and who's to balm, but the big question isn't about solving a mystery. It's more "now that Harry is dead, what shall we do with him?"

The cast is first rate, and includes John Forsyth as an artist in a small town, a very young Shirley McLaine in her first movie role as a young widow, an even younger Jerry Mathers (later to gain fame as Beaver Cleaver) as her son. There also a number of faces very familiar to fans of the classic era of movies, like Edmund Gwynn, who played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, and Mildred Natwick, who made a specialty of playing spinsters in a great many movies.

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A young kid Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers, Theodore 'Beaver' Cleaver in the Leave it to Beaver series) is playing in a field and some shots are fired. Soon Arnie comes upon a body. We are now prepared for suspense and mystery.

Turns out pretty formula; in the sense that everybody and nobody could have done it. At first it seems slow and weird as no one acts normal even for a movie character. They are all slow, nonchalant, and distracted. Harry gets dragged around and buried in controversy.

Soon you can really get wrapped up in the story and anticipate the end. The movie never picks up speed; you just have more loose ends to follow. No one cares who bumped Harry off or if they did as long as it does not affect his or her future.

The draw to this movie now days and maybe then is the list of actors and the introduction of Shirley MacLaine. Edmund Gwenn looks pretty old here and is remembered also for his performance in "Outward Bound" (1930) 25 years earlier. Being directed by Alfred Hitchcock, there is still that Hitchcock feel. So sit back and enjoy it for what it is.

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Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry," about a body that won't go away, is far more odd than suspenseful, probably making it among the least watchable of the master's 1950s color classics. The rich landscapes and fall colors, though, make this light look at the subject of death the logical choice for Blu-Ray's sharpening technology. This was among the movies Hitchcock locked away after its initial release until after his death. Did he suspect, I wonder, that advances in technology would one day be able to make this box office failure into a feast for the eyes?

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