The Trouble With Harry

There are so many films of which one sighs “if only Cary Grant had played the lead” – and none more so than this story about a body (Harry) that keeps on being buried and dug up as different characters think they are, and then are not, the ones responsible for the death.

Instead of Grant who had already beeen in Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief released the same year), we get the expressionless John Forsythe and the result is a potentially very funny black comedy that largely misses its mark (although as the director purposely choose not to have star actors in order to give the film a more mundane feel, one might say that he achieved his end).

Amusingly scripted by John Michael Hayes from a story by Jack Trevor with its dead-pan irony and double-entendre humour amidst the well-mannered life of rural Vermont the film has a very English tone but Hitchcock keeps it too flat for its American setting and it is little surprise that it was a box-office failure in the States although it did very well in the UK.

FYI: The film was Bernard Herrmann's first collaboration with Hitchcock and Shirley MacLaine’s film debut.

 

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