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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1950s
    Movies - 1950s Movies - T 2 Mins Read

    Trouble with Harry, The (1955)

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    A macabre comedy about a body that refuses to stay buried, The Trouble With Harry is an unusually rustic entry in the Hitchcock canon that’s reminiscent of his Shadow of a Doubt in its subversion of our image of the squeaky-clean American small town.

    In Highwater, Vermont, a young boy named Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers) finds the dead body of a man named Harry Worp (Philip Truex) on the hillside above the village.

    The tragedy of Harry’s death, though, plays second fiddle to the farce of the citizens’ attempts to keep the corpse concealed, with huntsman Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), Harry’s estranged wife Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) and elderly spinster Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) all separately believing themselves responsible for his death.

    Nobody seems keen to report the death to the police and in the course of the film, Harry’s corpse is buried, disinterred and re-interred several times as these three individuals and their friends and associates try to decide what they should do with it.

    The humour is jet black but it plays out against the fleeting, gilded beauty of deciduous trees on the turn. Too fleeting in fact, and when Hitchcock’s crew arrived too late to catch autumnal Vermont in its prime, they were forced to glue fallen leaves back onto branches.

    The acting is perfection, with 21-year-old MacLaine (in her film debut) quite wonderful, and Hitchcock was mighty proud of this adaptation of Jack Trevor Story’s novel, always naming it among his personal favourites.

    Captain Albert Wiles
    Edmund Gwenn
    Sam Marlowe
    John Forsythe
    Jennifer Rogers
    Shirley MacLaine
    Miss Ivy Gravely
    Mildred Natwick
    Mrs Wiggs
    Mildred Dunnock
    Arnie Rogers
    Jerry Mathers
    Calvin Wiggs
    Royal Dano
    Millionaire
    Parker Fennelly
    Tramp
    Barry Macollum
    Dr Greenbow
    Dwight Marfield
    Art critic
    Leslie Woolf
    Harry Worp
    Philip Truex
    Chauffeur
    Ernest Curt Bach

    Director
    Alfred Hitchcock

    Video

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