It’s not often that I finish an
Alfred Hitchcock picture unable to take something away from it but I feel like
I wasted my time with The Trouble with
Harry. A departure from the type of mystery that made his name, this is a
black comedy with thriller elements. Set during a crisp autumn in Vermont, a retired sea
captain discovers the recently deceased body of a man while out hunting on a
hill. Believing to be responsible for his death, the captain attempts to hide
the body but various passers by happen upon it and react in unusual ways. It
turns out that several people believe themselves responsible and the small
community at the bottom of the hill attempt to discover exactly what happened
to the man and what to do next.
The use of the body, which turns
out to be that of the titular character, is a clever Macguffin which is used to
unite two couples in what turns out to be a romantic black comedy. Ordinarily
when a Hitchcock movie opens on a corpse, you’d be expecting a whodunit but here
that isn’t important to the director. For me, that’s one of the problems. I
wanted more excitement and intrigue from the film. Although billed as a comedy,
I didn’t laugh once and was barely amused. The film just washed over me with a
plot that didn’t grab me in the slightest. More disappointing than the plot is
the cast who are as wooden as the corpse they attempt to cover up.
