Trouble with Harry, The (1955)

reviewed by
Mark O'Hara


The Trouble with Harry (1955)
A Film Essay by Mark O'Hara

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Harry is dead, of course, is the trouble. Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to structure a feature film around a minor character, the corpse that links the plot and helps to unite two separate couples.

In the color-tinged hills outside a small New England hamlet, retired Captain Albert Wiles (a beardless Edmund Gwen) is shooting illegally (on "posted" land). He fires three shots, heard by five year-old Arnie Rogers (a pre-Beaver Jerry Mathers), who is roving around with his toy gun. The free-ranging narrative then has Arnie finding the dead man lying rather neatly in a clearing. After Arnie skedaddles, Wiles discovers the corpse, and we witness Hitchcock's version of mistaken identity. Wiles thinks he killed the man. He hides as a series of characters happen upon Harry Worp and then depart again.

Soon a tramp wanders by. Wiles hides and watches him steal Harry's shoes. Then a bookworm doctor literally stumbles over the corpse, not even noticing. Arnie brings back his mother (Shirley MacLaine in her very first role). What would be surprising in a film made by any other director, is not surprising here. Mrs. Rogers is glad to see that this man, her husband, is dead. Finally, Miss Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick, the quintessential character actress of the middle of the century) comes by. She also ignores the gravity of a cadaver in the midst of a countryside ablaze with fall colors.

What complicates the situation is that Miss Gravely witnesses Wiles dragging the body toward the woods. But the main issue is her inviting the captain to her house for coffee and blueberry muffins. So the body is left in the country.

In another plotline, eccentric artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe, one of Hitchcock's best and most suave leading men) totes another of his paintings to the woman who runs the town's general store, Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock). Shortly, Miss Gravely stops in to stock up for her date with Wiles. Thereafter, the artist and Wiles meet up, and decide to bury the body. The killing was an accident, and no one was really harmed, after all. What works here is the suspended logic, a lapse that becomes hilarious. No one has so far been compelled to call the police! And when Wiles finally reasons that Harry could not have died from one of his stray bullets, the way is opened for other suspects. Could Miss Gravely be guilty of causing Harry's death, after she whacked him with her cleated hiking shoe? Or did he die of an edema from a blow to the head inflicted by his estranged wife?

With the odd slant of its premise, "The Trouble with Harry" slightly resembles "Arsenic and Old Lace." As if it were a play, the film's cast is small and its scenes occupy few locations - the hill, the store, Jennifer Rogers' house. The feeling is intimate and light, even though the subject matter is grim -- hence the film's functioning as a black comedy. Further, Hitchcock's sense of the dramatic surfaces through the appearance of Mrs. Wiggs' son Calvin (Royal Dano, another amazing character actor, who is nevertheless too old to be the offspring of the woman playing his mother). Will Calvin, a deputy sheriff, catch Wiles and Marlowe during one of the times they are burying and digging up Harry?

John Forsythe takes Hitchcock's direction very well. His manner is at once direct and unassuming, as he meets Mrs. Rogers and proceeds to fall in love. Forsythe is as good as Cary Grant at playing nonchalant and laid-back. And Shirley MacLaine, though her hair is unflatteringly short, is fine to watch as Mrs. Rogers. Her lack of concern over her husband's death, as well as her falling for Sam Marlowe, creates the comic absurdity that enables Hitchcock's story to succeed.

There's a very funny quote, too, though I doubt it's famous. "He's in the bathroom, playing with his frog." Watch the film to find out the ironic context. Moreover, try to spot the portly director himself amid these pastoral surroundings.

Hitchcock never claimed to be a creator of epics. The nature of his pictures, so many of them set in motion by small but momentous acts, defies the criteria of epics. Perhaps "The Trouble with Harry" does not rank with his masterworks, but it surely serves as solid entertainment, and as a model for any director who is fascinated with making films centered around the sometimes seamy vicissitudes of life.


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