Hitchcock's second pure comedy after the screwball of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) is a black comedy about an inconvenient corpse who the inhabitants of a small village in rural Vermont have alternating reasons for burying and digging up again.
The macabre premise is made comic by the unconscious hyper-irony of the characters' reaction to the situation. It's very understated, very dry, and that's always been very Hitchcock. And it is funny, with many big laughs.
As ever, Hitch's support cast adds so much humour to his film, particularly Edmund Gwenn in his fourth and final collaboration with the Master, at the age of 82, having debuted with The Skin Game in 1931.
The then little known Shirley MacLaine made her screen debut in this film, and what inspired casting she was, the Queen of Kook. The picturesque location shooting of autumn in New England is a bonus too. Not a typical Hitchcock film of course, but entirely successful.