I had never seen The Trouble With Harry before and nothing really prepared me. It is like no other Hitchcock film I've seen and is really more in the spirit of a Wes Anderson film. It's absurd, and romantic, and darkly comic. I spent the entire movie not believing what I was seeing.
A young boy finds a dead body in the woods on a lovely fall day and then the film progresses through a number of people stumbling across him, none seeming to be very upset he's dead, each perhaps believing they were the ones to do him in only to discover they weren't. They bury him, dig him up, and repeat that process. Along the way two couples fall in love and move on, all better off Harry is gone.
There were moments I laughed out loud, more out of surprise at what I was seeing than in reaction to a real joke. But the film is quite funny in its way. But that's the thing about Harry, it's its own animal. It's not romantic like romantic movies. It's not mysterious like mysteries. It's not darkly comic like most dark comedies.
The film with its technicolour pastoral setting and twisty plot remains absurd in its sensibilities. It is a strong shift from most of the director's work leading up to it, almost like he was trying something completely different. I understand the film wasn't a commercial success and perhaps that could be expected as film makers get boxed into a certain type and have a hard time breaking out. He had just made the masterpiece Rear Window and the romance To Catch a Thief. He would go on to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much and would go on to make his signature films Vertigo and Psycho. But in the middle he made this quirky, weird, oddball of a film and in someways that in itself is fascinating.
The Trouble With Harry
Starring: Shirley MacLaine, John Forsythe, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, Royal Dano
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: John Michael Hayes
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