“The Trouble With Harry” has to be the damnedest film Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Although all of his films have witty elements in their carefully constructed and orchestrated screenplays, this is one of his few movies that is a straight comedy.
Of course it is not without Hitchcockian elements, but it is at times a maddening film with the plot of a screwball and the dry delivery of an Ealing comedy.
As the tagline goes, the trouble with Harry is that he’s dead. A little boy (Jerry Mathers, before he was in “Leave it to Beaver.” Did the Beaver ever trade a dead rabbit for a frog and two blueberry muffins?) stumbles across a dead body in the lovely and idyllic Vermont forest. It’s poor Harry Wolp, and Capt. Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) believes he shot him while hunting for rabbits. He’s about to move the body, but person after person walks by before the Captain can hide it, including the boy with his mother, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine, in her debut film role).
She doesn’t seem fazed by the body at all, but in fact no one does. That’s sort of the strange appeal of “The Trouble With Harry.” Maybe it’s the peaceful autumn foliage, but no one seems to appreciate the severity of the situation that a man is mysteriously dead, and like many of Hitchcock’s heroes, one has been wrongly accused of the accident.
The town’s local painter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) gets involved when he learns that the attractive Jennifer is in fact the wife of the deceased, and even for him ordinary emotions or reactions seem foreign. The film was famous for its bluntness at the time, and it hasn’t gotten any better. “I’d love to paint you in the nude,” he comes right out and says as he holds up and examines Jennifer’s blue dress.
Maybe that’s not as weird as the Captain’s line in regards to his fling, Miss Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick). “She is a well preserved woman, and every jar of preserves has to be opened sometime.”
It’s a line like that that drives me nuts. Is this movie dated or is it just weird? The movie slowly escalates as Hitch carefully falls back on old tropes that have been constantly carried throughout the film. The running gag is that the group can’t decide what to do with the body and is constantly digging up and reburying Harry, but soon the gags stop seeming Hitchcockian or clever and begin just sounding repetitive, tired and ultimately strange.
Aiding in that process is the first of eight Bernard Hermann and Hitchcock collaborations. Hermann has a truly lively score that is bouncy, sprightly, ominous and particularly varied. Hermann follows the action of the film fairly closely at times to underscore the gags, and the wide array of instruments he incorporates into his score is a departure from the minimal use of only strings in things like the “Psycho” score.
Still though, “The Trouble With Harry” is a peculiar, interesting film. The audience I saw it with loved it and had never seen anything like it. If I’m remembering correctly, this is one of my grandfather’s favorites, a category of movies I didn’t realize even existed for him. But maybe it’s oddball charms and somewhat unclassifiable nature make it appropriate for such praise.