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the trouble with harry review
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movie review

Paramount had no idea how to promote this picture, and it was no surprise that it flopped at the box office. No matter, for this is a blithe little comedy, produced and directed with affection by Alfred Hitchcock, about a bothersome corpse that just can't stay buried.

Edmund Gwenn is a delight as a retired 'sea' captain who stumbles on Harry's corpse while rabbit hunting. In the belief he did the killing, he decides to bury the cadaver on the spot. Harry goes in and out of the ground three or four times, is responsible for two romances and not a little consternation and physical exercise.

During the course of events Gwenn and Mildred Natwick, a middle-aged spinster who thinks she did Harry in, find love, as do John Forsythe, local artist, and Shirley MacLaine (making her screen debut), young widow of the in-and-out Harry. Natwick pairs perfectly with Gwenn, and the script from the novel by Jack Trevor Story provides them with dialogue and situations that click.

personal thoughts

Having seen this several times over the years I've come to the conclusion that it's one of Hitch's most underrated films. There's something about it that I can't put my finger on. The only other time I've said that about a film is Powell/Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale filmed a decade or so earlier. There is the one obvious similarity in that there are four main characters but apart from that there is nothing that links them apart from that indefinable 'magic'. Maybe it's atmospheric; maybe it's some of the Expressionistic shots that Hitchcock liked to use and linger on; maybe it's the slightly unreal glorious colour that harks back to the Jack Cardiff-shot masterpieces for the aforementioned Powell & Pressburger; maybe it's the ethereal music that I appreciate more and more with each listen; maybe it's all these things combined but whatever it is the results are magic.

The four main stars are good with Gwenn the kind of supporting star who can fill the screen with his presence whenever we need a break from the younger stars and Forsythe as solidly young here as he was solidly old in Dynasty. But it is Shirley MacLaine who I find extraordinary in this her screen debut. You just can't take your eyes off her. She is as beautiful as anyone I have seen on the big screen but it is more than that: it's her presence, that star quality she possesses here that entices you, captures you. In other words, if she wasn't in the movie then it wouldn't be as magic,

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