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The Trouble with Harry (1955)
Topic Started: Aug 29 2011, 10:11 PM (395 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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So, I'm at a charity-fund-raising-book-bazaar kinda thing, and there in the 50˘ box is an original 1949 hardcover (with dust jacket!) of J. Trevor Story's 'The Trouble with Harry', instantly recognized as a minor Hitchcock film from 1955. This is the film that, when it was finally re-released in the mid-1980s after being out of circulation for a couple of decades, made people go, "Wha? Huh?" But then, it was re-released with Vertigo, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Rear Window. I saw it in theatres, and I liked it well enough, but not as much as those films. I liked it better now, as Mr. Panzer will be happy to know (he loves it).

Anyway, I read the book (all 121 pages of it); it's breezy, quirky, oh-so-British, and filled with daffy characters. A nice, quick read. Supposedly, Hitch loved the book and decided to rest and recuperate from the grueling productions of Rear Window and To Catch a Thief by taking Alma to Vermont to see the changing of the leaves. He transplanted the story from England to New England. Worked fine.

So, a little boy discovers a corpse (that would be Harry) in the woods and runs home to tell mommy. Meanwhile, the man who mistook him for a rabbit and accidentally shot him, a retired sea captain who lives in the burg, decides to hide the body. Before he can do so, however, various townspeople wander by and either trip over Harry, ignore him, steal his shoes, or seem quite happy he's deceased. As it turns out, Harry's destruction isn't quite as simple as the captain thought, and there is a variety of possible explanations for the trouble with Harry. As the folks in town hash it out, Harry gets buried, reburied, and re-reburied over the course of the investigation.

Okay, so, let's meet our cast: John Forsythe is a struggling local artist who is romancing Shirley MacLaine, all of one score old, in her film debut (and as cute as can be), the mommy referred to a few sentences ago. Seems that Harry was her husband, but not the little boy's daddy - the boy's uncle, actually. I could explain it, but it's complicated. (The boy is li'l pre-Beaver Jerry Mathers, by the way.) The captain is Edmund Gwenn and he's romancing the town's spinster, Mildred Natwick, who, when faced with the deceased Harry for the first time, walks up to him and kicks him to make sure he's dead. Then she makes blueberry muffins for the captain.

Hitchcock would've thought all this stuff - fun with a corpse - was hilarious, and this is a movie that always delighted him, even though it's never been rated all that high in his canon. Obviously, it's not a classic, but it's a very amusing diversion. I wish Forsythe hadn't been cast; he's not appealing at all, and if this had been made in 1941 with Cary Grant, it'd be considered a masterpiece. That said, there's a LOT of naughty dialog, talk of double beds and Shirley's first wedding night and opening the virginal spinster's "jar of preserves" and stuff like that. It's all very close to the book, with the elimination of some minor characters (who were fooling around in the woods around Harry's body) and the addition of a comic policeman, whose investigation gives the film it's only real suspense, such as it is. Jerry Mathers as the film's funniest word; he's carting around a dead rabbit. "What's that?" the captain asks him. "A dead rabbit." "What do you call it?" "Dead."

The DVD is fine, with a 30-min. documentary on the making of the film (the leaves fell fast that year, they moved to L.A. and glued dead, painted leaves on fake trees), a horrendous trailer created to promote the 1980s video release, and some stills.
Edited by Laughing Gravy, Jul 20 2014, 10:41 AM.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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JazzGuyy
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I think you mean 1 score for Ms. MacLaine's age. 2 score is 40.
TANSTAAFL!
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panzer the great & terrible
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I get the impression that this review is written by two different people, one who knows about movies and another who doesn't...well...know quite as much and who uses unGravylike, amateur-writer words like 'horrendous' and 'twoscore.' I would ask "wuzzup?" but I think I already figgered it out.

What I love about Harry is the fresh, nubile Maclaine talkin' as dirty as you could back then. "I have a short fuse," she says. Delectable.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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Frank Hale
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Nice to see you two are still at it.

The comic policeman providing the suspense was Royal Dano, an actor I read once was considered a “character actor’s character actor”, or something along those lines. I don’t especially agree, since he seemed to concentrate exclusively on over-the-top eccentrics, like Elijah in “Moby Dick”.

Agree with Gravy’s assessment otherwise. Hitchcock may have liked this film a lot, but it’s not one I particularly care to revisit despite the nice scenery and music.
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Laughing Gravy
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*counting on fingers and toes*

Yeah, one score, right, thanks.

I've seen this film twice now, Mr. H., in 1984 and in 2011. Next viewing, then, will be 2038. Sounds about right.

"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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