Rent The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Local Village Panics Politely - The Trouble with Harry review by griggs

Autumnal Vermont is postcard-pretty here — every leaf looks like its been touched up — and Hitchcock uses the scenery to smuggle in a.very odd little comedy. A body turns up in the fictional hamlet of Highwater and the locals react like they’ve found a damp patch: awkward, solvable, best handled quietly.

The film keep circling one daft question — what do you do with Harry? — and answers it by burying him, digging him up, and burying him again, mostly to keep the authorities from poking around. The humour is dark, but never mean. Everyone’s eccentric, but politely so.

Shirley MacLaine’s debut is a treat: bright, bread, properly funny, like she’s always belonged in this sideways world. Sunny Hitchcock, still with teeth,

Oddball Comedy. - The Trouble with Harry review by Steve

Alfred Hitchcock's second purely comic film- after the screwball of Mr. & Mrs. Smith in '41- is a farcical black comedy about an inconvenient corpse who the eccentric inhabitants of a small village in rural Vermont have alternating reasons for burying and digging up again.

The macabre premise (from a novel by Jack Trevor Story) is played for laughs, principally through the deadpan reactions of the characters' to the absurd situations. It's very understated, very dry, and that's always been very Hitchcock. And it is funny, with many big laughs.

As ever, Hitchcock's support cast adds so much to the humour, particularly Edmund Gwenn in his fourth and final collaboration at the age of 82, having started with The Skin Game in '31. Shirley MacLaine makes her screen debut, and what an inspired choice! She is instantly the Queen of Kook.

One of the main pleasures is the picturesque setting of autumn in New England, filmed in Technicolor. Another is Bernard Herrmann's first soundtrack for the Master, which the director said was his favourite. Not a typical Hitchcock suspense thriller of course, but entirely successful.