Grade: B+
Synopsis: A group of rural Vermonters (Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, and Shirley MacLaine) finds their lives complicated by a corpse.
The Trouble with Harry is a wonderful black comedy from director Alfred Hitchcock.
Eschewing the star-driven approach, Hitchcock instead works with an ensemble cast that absolutely shines. The humor here derives from the juxtaposition of the prim and proper 1950’s rural New Englanders and their matter-of-fact approach to disposing of a corpse. It’s a problem to be dealt with, a large inconvenience, not a horrifying dead body. None of them gives more than a passing thought to the ethics of burying someone they think they, or a friend of theirs, might have killed. It’s sharp, well played, and serves as a great satire of 1950’s culture.
The film also marked the screen debut of Shirley MacLaine, who’s utterly charming at only 21 years of age, as well as the first collaboration between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, whose classic score helps set just the right tone for the film.
If The Trouble with Harry has a flaw, it’s that it plays its joke out a little too long. At 99 minutes, it’s about 10 minutes too long. While this isn’t a glaring problem, it does keep a very good film from being a great one.
