I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie.
That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.
All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.
Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.
Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead.
The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
