Alfred Hitchcock (1955)
Harry is, for most of The Trouble with Harry, a corpse. The trouble with him is that the other main characters, all residents of a little town in Vermont, have to bury and exhume him repeatedly, according to whichever arrangement they think will mean fewer difficult questions for them to answer. Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) was very briefly married to Harry. They’ve been separated for years and Jennifer is shocked enough by his sudden reappearance on her doorstep to hit him on the head with a milk bottle. Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick), walking in the hills above the town and confronted by Harry as he emerges from the bushes still reeling from the effect of the milk bottle, strikes him, in self-defence, with the heel of her hiking boot. Old Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), out on the hillside to shoot rabbits, thinks he’s accidentally hit a different, human target when he comes across Harry’s body. Artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), who’s ready and willing to help Wiles dispose of the body, is in love with the legally still spoken for Jennifer. None of these four could care less about Harry’s death beyond the problems it may cause them from Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano), who gets paid by the number of arrests he makes. Harry’s corpse is discovered by Jennifer’s young son Arnie (Jerry Mathers), as he runs about on the hills, with his own toy rifle, on a beautiful late summer morning.
The agreeable score is by Bernard Herrmann. The screenplay is, like other Hitchcock films of the mid-fifties, by John Michael Hayes (adapted from a story by Jack Trevor Story). The cinematographer is Robert Burks, who worked with Hitchcock almost uninterruptedly from Strangers on a Train to Marnie (the one, signal interruption was Psycho). Yet I came out of The Trouble with Harry thinking how uncharacteristic a Hitchcock movie it was. A black comedy that is three parts farce and one part fairy tale, it’s perfectly pleasant and mildly witty but to describe this picture as lacking in suspense would be an understatement: the tempo is lulling, verging on listless. The New England trees, still in full leaf, are glorious but otherwise the movie isn’t visually exciting. Harry’s feet look comical and there’s a nice moment when Miss Gravely politely steps over the corpse yet the burials and unearthings aren’t as inventive as you’d expect. Harry is greatly dependent on the quality of ensemble acting and the movie is, with a single, serious exception, well cast. I chose to go and see it largely because it was Shirley MacLaine’s big screen debut: familiar as she is by now, she’s also fresh and original as Jennifer – the impact of her vivid comic truthfulness must have been, getting on for sixty years ago, terrific. Edmund Gwenn’s portrait of Wiles (he turns out to have been in charge of a tugboat on the East River rather than a sailor of the seven seas) is compassionately funny. Mildred Natwick develops Miss Gravely from a fairly conventional screen spinster into a character that’s emotionally dynamic but always amusing. Royal Dano is engagingly slow-witted as the spoilsport deputy sheriff and Mildred Dunnock is his mother, who runs the local store. All these actors are not only genuinely and distinctively eccentric; they play well together. Jerry Mathers as Arnie can be complimented on being a lot less annoying than he might have been.
According to the 1984 Film Comment piece by Dave Kehr used as the BFI programme note, Hitchcock ‘doesn’t make his customary cameo appearance’ and this seems an appropriate indication that, all in all, he’s a less strong presence than usual in this movie. A pity that, as an editorial parenthesis in the note explains, Kehr is wrong on this point. But his piece is very instructive and was perfectly complementary to Philip French’s TLS review of the BFI Hitchcock season and new publications about the Master, which I happened to read immediately before I went to see The Trouble with Harry. French’s TLS article ends as follows:
‘There is indeed something about Alfred Hitchcock that only a handful of other filmmakers have; he creates a fascination that makes one want to explore every aspect of his life and work, however seemingly insignificant, perverse or repellent. He imposes himself on us. In this sense he does resemble Shakespeare.’
I think I disagree with every word of that but it was remarkable to read Dave Kehr’s piece just a couple of hours after French’s. I could just about see how Kehr, picking up where French left off, managed to find in the ending of The Trouble with Harry ‘the harmony of a Shakespearean comedy’ but his note is, for the most part, an example of the rarefied way in which an auteurist critic views a movie by an admired director. Auteurism abhors an actor who deflects attention from the director’s genius and in spite of the primacy of the players in The Trouble with Harry there isn’t a word about any of the actors as actors. Edmund Gwenn is described entirely in terms of his links with Hitchcock, including their similarity of physique, and the ‘contrast between Gwenn and [John] Forsythe is the same contrast Hitchcock employed in his alternate casting of James Stewart and Cary Grant, with Stewart playing the guilt-ridden, insecure morbidly romantic persona and Grant representing the the polished, confident, often cruel seducer’. It’s a struggle to see James Stewart’s character in, for example, Rear Window or The Man Who Knew Too Much in Kehr’s terms but that’s not the point. Kehr is interested only in what the casting of Gwenn and Forsythe in The Trouble with Harry means (to Kehr) in the context of the Hitchcock canon. He explains that Forsythe’s character Sam Marlowe, as an abstract expressionist painter, is also ‘an idealised image of Hitchcock’s own’, since in the 1950s ‘Hitchcock’s work had begun to move toward a greater abstraction, leaving behind the bothersome details of plot construction and character’. This too seems miles wide of the mark in relation to, for example, Strangers on a Train or I Confess or Rear Window. His descriptions of both the James Stewart persona and this shift in approach suggest that Kehr is thinking forward to Vertigo, the pinnacle of Hitchcock’s work for auteurist critics.
As Sam Marlowe, John Forsythe is pleasant, intelligent and not a patch on either James Stewart or Cary Grant. In fact, Forsythe is very dull, to an extent that seriously weakens the momentum of The Trouble with Harry. That dullness is probably a good thing to Dave Kehr: Forsythe’s lack of personality means that he fits into a preconception of Hitchcock’s universe without the troublesome friction of individuality. Although I think Hitchcock is overrated, I accept that at his best he combined the gifts of being a master entertainer and an innovative filmmaker to an exceptional degree. But it’s the combination that makes him what he is: if the two qualities aren’t both in working order his films are underpowered. It was no surprise to learn from Wikipedia that The Trouble with Harry was a box-office failure. Commercial success may be a very fallible indicator of merit but I think filmgoers of the time probably sensed that Hitchcock, who enjoyed ‘playing the audience like a piano’, was dozing at the keys here. Perhaps he really was tired: when Harry was released in October 1955, it was the fourth Hitchcock movie to reach cinemas in less than eighteen months and two others followed during 1956.
20 September 2012
