The Trouble with Harry: Movie & DVD Review

(Originally published 2005)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 movie "The Trouble with Harry" is a sly, subtle black comedy in the British vein that's laced with sexual innuendoes, an enthusiastic skewering of Puritanism and fringe New Englander characters that resist caricature.

As written by John Michael Hayes, screenwriter for "Peyton Place" and "Butterfield 8" as well as several of Hitchcock's best films - "Rear Window," "To Catch a Thief," "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - the movie finds Hitchcock experimenting with comedy, turning it on its side as he did with suspense, infusing it with his dark sense of humor, twisting it into something unique and unexpected.

As such, "Harry" is an absurdist's dream, with a few nice laughs and good performances tucked within a screwy story about a bothersome corpse named Harry who can't seem to stay buried and whose death could be attributed to any number of people.

When we first see him, Harry is lying stiff in a Vermont field, toes pointed toward the heavens, perhaps dead from malicious means, perhaps not. His body allows for a series of misunderstandings to unspool, with John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn, Jerry Mathers, Mildred Natwick and Mildred Dunnock all playing characters who factor into the mystery. Who is responsible for Harry's death? That's part of the trouble here - not that any of these chilly people are particularly moved by his death.

Of the film, Hayes once said that "Hitchcock wanted to do the movie just for fun, for relief from what he was doing regularly." Hitchcock himself noted that the film was "an expensive self-indulgence, though it went over quite well whenever it reached an audience."

Essentially, that's the director's tongue-in-cheek way of saying that it didn't really connect at all - the movie bombed in the States and in England (Paramount refused to push it), with Paris alone serving as its most enthusiastic supporter. There, the movie ran an astonishing six months to sold-out shows.

While it's true that "Harry" isn't the best of the Hitchcock lot and that nobody should come to it expecting raucous laughs - you won't find them here - it's also true that like all of Hitchcock's films, it has its indelible moments.

Among them are the unforgettable scenes in which Jerry Mathers ("Leave it to Beaver") finds his favorite toy in a dead rabbit, and also there's the bonus of seeing MacLaine in her first feature role. This isn't the brassy MacLaine we've come to know over the years - she was just 20 here, still an ingenue. Still, watching her spar with Forsythe, who would go on to star in the television series "Dynasty," allows for flashes of the robust actress MacLaine would become.

Grade: B+