The Trouble With Harry [VHS]
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Product details
Actor: Ernest Curt Bach, John Forsythe, Mildred Dunnock, Parker Fennelly, Royal DanoPrimary Contributor: John Forsythe
Primary Contributor: Edmund Gwenn
Primary Contributor: Shirley MacLaine
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
Running Time: 99 minutes
Release Date: 1999-08-03
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Publisher: Universal Studios
Studio: Universal Studios
VHS Movie Reviews of The Trouble With Harry [VHS]
Movie Review: A whole dead body is in a pair of shoes and bicolor socks
Summary: 5 Stars
What's most surprising about this film is the date, 1955. It is a nice criminal detective comedy since all ends well that had started very grimly and so bad. If we take this film like all films by Hitchcock should be taken, that is to say as a metaphor of real life, of history, of fate, then we might be less surprised by the date. After all the worst is gone, is behind. The war is finished, the second world war and the Korean war, and even McCarthy is dead and buried, politically I mean. We can breathe. The future is clear. The complications are all behind. We are finally getting out of this dark hole in which we had been buried for a long time. The famous post war thirty glorious years and its baby boom generation are starting to bring in the fruit of our suffering, sweating and efforts if not travail. What we have produced is being bought by some millionaire. Our work is recognized and valorized. We are going to be famous, great, rich, beautiful, who knows what else. So we can bury the past. We can un-bury it, and then bury it again, and eventually un-bury it a second time, but why not re-bury that poor past in order to finally get it out once more and discover it was not so bad and it was nothing but some kind of sad heart disease, a disease of the heart, a weak heart crushed by passions, love passion, dreams that me made into nightmares, and maybe some anger. But the film is surprising because Hitchcock manages to have absolutely no staircase, no flights of steps, with or without mezzanines, and yet don't believe me that easy because it is not flat country indeed. And so up they go and down they go, the roads and the tramps, and all the other people in that village, uphill and downhill, upstage and downstage, upriver and downriver, up the strokes and down the strokes to paint and paint and paint reality till no one recognizes it or sees it. And if it were not enough to constantly go up and down lanes and paths and trails and tracks, you go up and down into and out of the ground, you dig out and fill up and dig in and refill up and dig out again and fill up a third time and dig up this time and fill down for the last time. All that vertical movement around a man who is dead and lying horizontal in the middle of the auburn and russet leaves of the fall. Hitchcock is still with us. And he is all the more with us because he explores the psyche of the human species. When they meet with death, their first reaction is to feel guilty for a crime they assume at once they have committed. Paranoid species. Then they feel relieved because someone else assumes the crime they have committed till they feel guilty again and reveal their own doing in the crime. Neurotic, psychotic and schizophrenic, all in one same species. But then they try to forget and wipe it out to go on with the present and their lives. But that is to no avail because life is stronger than illusions and death is even stronger than life. So the crime comes back because it has to be brought out and registered for the life of the living to be able to go on. And it is then that it is all revealed that human beings are as dumb as my thumb and instead of having thought and thought again and pondered, they jumped to conclusions without even thinking one second. And it is the crazy doctor who trips on cadavers all the time and beg their pardons for having disturbed them who finds out all that death was natural and the hullabaloo was nothing but a mid summer night's dream in the middle of the fall. In other words Hitchcock is questioning us on the real value of life when death is no longer a crime. There seems to be little left in life if that is the case. Crime and murder are the real spices of life which is so banal and tasteless otherwise.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Not Lesser Hitchcock, Just Unusually Comic with a Likeable Cast
Summary: 4 Stars
I never thought it fair that this 1955 black comedy was labeled "lesser Hitchcock". Granted it is "atypical Hitchcock" given its light touch and lack of threatening violence (save for three gunshots heard at the beginning), but master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock has made other movies far more out of his oeuvre like the sparkling 1941 Carole Lombard-Robert Montgomery romantic comedy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. At least this one hews closer to his macabre sense of humor as it revolves around what to do with a persistent corpse, the body of Harry Worp. First, a freckle-faced little boy named Arnie comes upon it, and then the rabbit-hunting Captain Wiles discovers it and thinks he carelessly shot Harry. The aptly named Miss Gravely, a homely spinster, sees Wiles drag the body and simply invites him for tea with romantic aspirations on her mind. She confesses she thinks she killed Harry with the heel of a hiking boot. Arnie's mother Jennifer Rogers sees the body, and the young widow twice over also recognizes Harry and also thinks he killed him but with a bottle.
Caught in the middle is eccentric artist Sam Marlowe, who nonchalantly helps his friends dispose of the body. Just how Harry died is the MacGuffin around which Hitchcock hinges his entire plot. With a perceptive screenplay by John Michael Hayes (Rear Window) based on a popular post-WWII British novel by Jack Trevor Story, the quaintly whimsical tone is what surprises most Hitchcock aficionados here, but the dialogue is also laced with not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. The combination proves effective on its own terms though not particularly transcendent as a memorable piece of filmmaking. The charming performances help considerably starting with John Forsythe, long before his Aaron Spelling years on Charlie's Angels and Dynasty, as Sam. He has definite chemistry with twenty-year-old Shirley MacLaine in her film debut. As Jennifer, she emerges with her gamine screen persona almost fully formed, and it's no wonder she continues to work in front of the camera over a half-century later.
Edmund Gwenn (memorable as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street) and Mildred Natwick play Wiles and Miss Gravely with pixilated cunning. That is indeed six-year-old Jerry Mathers as Arnie a couple of years before starting his six-year run on Leave It to Beaver. A couple of behind-the-scenes aspects are worth noting - Robert Burks' superb cinematography capturing the colorful autumnal glory of New England and Bernard Herrmann's rhythmic soundtrack, his first of several classic scores for Hitchcock. Presenting a pristine print of the film, the 2006 DVD provides one other significant extra, an original half-hour documentary, Laurent Bouzereau's "The Trouble With Harry Isn't Over", featuring interviews with Forsythe, Hayes, associate producer Herbert Coleman, and Hitchcock's daughter Pat Hitchcock O'Connell. It's an insightful piece about the production complications and idiosyncratic casting like the producers taking a chance on MacLaine. Along with the original theatrical trailer, there is also a 38-still production gallery as well as about five pages of production notes.
Movie Review: The Sunny Side of Hitchcock
Summary: 4 Stars
I actually saw this movie when it first came out but all I remembered was that there was this really talented, sort of off-beat young actress in it whom I thought would go far (Shirley MacLaine!), an "older guy" (John Forsythe) beautiful autumn colors and something about a lot of digging. I couldn't remember the title and I don't think I identified it with Hitchcock. Over the years I would occasionally think of the film and wonder what is was. So, it was with great delight that I found it again recently, on the library shelf and I was very happy that I enjoyed it as much this time as the first!
Yes, it is Hitchcock but in a totally different mode than the dark suspenseful ones he's associated with. I found the whole film delightful to re-see and enjoyed every moment. The Hitchcock humor is there, although I certainly would not call it "dark" as others have. Yes, MacLaine was fresh and full of charm, as I had recalled. (She did go far!) John Forsythe did seem a bit old for her and not quite as wonderful as the rest of the cast, but he held his own. Edmund Gwynn is totally adorable, sort of a Hitchcock clone, with his fat belly and sweet disposition. Mildred Natwick is perfect, too, as the spinster with her eye on Gwynn.
The Vermont countryside at the height of its Autumn show plays a major part in the film, (even though they had to leave and film half of it back in California.) The golden light and spectacular colors as well as the immaculate white frame houses give a lightheartedness to the movie that adds an important dimension to the tale. It's the justaposition of the sweetnes and lightness of the village scene with the terrible tragedy of finding a dead body in the woods that one might have killed that gives the film its peculiar humor. It is taken from an English novel and I think it almost might have been better if it had not been transposed to America. However Hitchcock a transplanted Brit, himself, pulls it off.
I think The Trouble with Harry is totally charming and should be considered on a par with many of Hitchcock's more highly rated films.
Movie Review: Where Is He?
Summary: 5 Stars
I first saw this in the theaters years ago. When I saw this available to
view at home, I just had to have it.
A great movie I believe. You won't be disappointed when you see it.
Movie Review: The Trouble with Harry
Summary: 5 Stars
The Trouble with Harry is one of my favorite Hitchcock movies. The subtle humor and the eclectic characters make the movie one of a kind. It is a must-see, if not a must-own! Try it, you will not be disappointed!
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