The Trouble With Harry

There is a man dead, lying in the grass peacefully. A variety of characters all seem quite morbidly calm about the whole thing as they pass him by. The first to see him, an older retired navy captain named Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, best known by today's audiences for his Academy Award-winning role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street), is constantly red-faced and by far the most fun to watch. He's on a hunting trip and believes he killed the man, who we come to know is named Harry, Harry Worp. He doesn't seem to be all that concerned. Even Harry's ex-wife, played by Shirley MacLaine in her debut movie, shows up and finds the whole thing humorously ordinary, telling her young boy that they will be lucky if Mr. Harry doesn't wake up from his deep sleep.

Wiles decides it's time to start flirting with a local lady named Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) over blueberry muffins and elderberry wine; there surely must be something satirical about this situation. There's rarely been an eclectic array of such peculiar characters juxtaposed with beautiful autumn Vista Vision colors in a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Fall trees, a one-room market, colorful paintings, and a dead man; most of the time, we just see his feet. It's a fairly far-fetched start.

There's a lot of 1950s overacting in the film that needs to be seen through the lens of hindsight, but most of the leads do a fine enough job. Even the young kid (played by Jerry Mathers, immortal to American audiences for the television show Leave It to Beaver) provides some proficient acting. Of all Hitchcock's female leads, MacLaine would go on to be the most successful; she's a living legend. As previously mentioned, Gwenn is the most interesting to watch and is certainly given the best dialogue. Another man shows up and steals Harry's shoes. Another decides to stop and do a painting of Harry. "Next thing you know," Wiles complains to himself, "they'll be televising the whole thing."

Despite all the autumn leaves and sweet lemonade, this New England town seems to exist in a world far darker than anything in Psycho or Rebecca. But soon the characters at least care about what kind of burial and funeral Harry is to have--a spot facing West, perhaps, so he can watch the sunset. They won't report his death to the authorities, but they'll make sure he has pretty views in the afterlife. In the meantime, however, the characters become convinced that they are not convinced how how he actually died, and the whole thing becomes sort of like a whodunnit Clue-esque caper story, a series of unfortunate, anomalous events.

The Trouble With Harry is not the most intriguing or exciting film Alfred Hitchcock directed, and it's filled with moments where some of the characters make decisions so outrageously stupid that they're hard to buy. It certainly has its moments though. Bernard Hermann's theme is just as interesting, though not as memorable, as his other scores for Hitchcock, though it was their first collaboration. There's a door that periodically opens in a rather eerie manner. If Ernst Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than other directors could with an open zipper, as Billy Wilder said, then perhaps Hitchcock could do more to inspire thrills with the opening of a door than lesser directors could with loud bumps in the night.