The Trouble with Harry (1955) - Hitchcock Friday #13

The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and scripted by John Michael Hayes.

It can be seen as one of Hitchcock’s experiments. This is not an experiment in technique nor an experiment with narrative. This is an experiment in tone. This is full-blown black comedy, but of a kind that was totally new in mainstream American cinema.

The comedy-mystery (as distinct from out-and-out spoofs of the mystery genre) was an established genre but in such movies the murder is always seen as a terrible crime the perpetrator of which had to be brought to justice. There could be amusing hijinks along the way but murder itself could not be treated as a joke. But in The Trouble with Harry the murder actually is treated as an hilarious joke. Poor Harry is dead but nobody cares except for the fact that the existence of his corpse is rather inconvenient.

As in Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock makes great use of small-town America as a setting but his purposes here are very different.

This is a gorgeous movie. This is a picture postcard world. A world so beautiful and idyllic that a corpse seems rather out of place.

You might think I’m weird but this movie seems to me to have a similar feel to the opening sequences of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is small town America at its most perfect, but it’s a bit too perfect. It’s so perfect it’s slightly disturbing. And while the people in this tiny burg are all very very nice people they regard poor Harry’s murder with total indifference. That’s the weird element that makes this movie so startling. And that makes it such an outrageous black comedy. The audience is not expected to feel the slightest concern about the fact that a man has been killed.

Which of course explains why this movie was initially a box-office flop (although it was re-released and eventually ended up in the black). Mainstream American audiences had never been exposed to such an oddly off-kilter movie. And they had never seen small town America subjected to such gleeful (albeit good-natured) mockery. It also explains why the movie was a hit in France. French audiences would not have been shocked in the least.

The other thing counting against this movie was its complete lack of star power. John Forsythe is well cast and he’s very good but he was never a big star and his name on the marquee was not going to sell tickets. Shirley MacLaine would become a star but at this stage she was a complete unknown and this was her first movie. Edmund Gwenn was the kind of character actor people would recognise without remembering his name. Big name stars might have made the movie easier to promote but as a star vehicle it would have been a different movie. It’s an ensemble piece and as such it works.

John Forsythe really is good. Shirley MacLaine was a nobody. She was just an understudy in a play when she was spotted. But she had the kooky quality Hitchcock wanted and he recognised her star quality immediately. She’s delightful here.

The plot is simple. A dead body turns up. His wallet identifies him as Harry. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), out hunting rabbits, assumes he shot poor Harry accidentally. And maybe he did. As the movie progresses other possibilities emerge. The one thing that is clear is that nobody cares that Harry is dead but his corpse is very inconvenient. The mystery doesn’t really matter. There’s no suspense. This is a comedy. A zany twisted deliciously black comedy. Black comedy was something Hitchcock did very very well. It was the kind of humour he loved.

The location shooting in Vermont is gorgeous, except that a lot of the time it’s not Vermont, it’s a Hollywood sound stage. The trees had already dropped their leaves, but Hitch wanted those lovely autumn leaves. So the crew collected the leaves, they were taken back to Hollywood and pinned onto fake trees on a sound stage. And it works. This is the magic of movies!

The Trouble with Harry is quirky and offbeat but delightful and charming. And it really is funny. It wasn’t what audiences and critics were expecting from Hitchcock but it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks exquisite and there’s a reasonably informative featurette.