This film is meant to be funny but is quite unfunny. I say this not because the center of the humor is a corpse. Don't get me wrong: corpses can be hilarious. This one isn't, though. I think that if this movie weren't a Hitchcock film, people wouldn't feel obligated to like it and thus wouldn't like it. The characters are extremely annoying (that little boy is not funny at all and he talks way too fast), the story moves soooo slowly, and the characters' motivations are constantly shifting (first the artist is all about himself and then he is Mr Magnanimous). The "reasons" the characters have for burying and exhuming Harry are not convincing--they seemed forced (like the writer needed 5 or 6 different reasons for burying a body but could find only a couple and just scraped together a few others to toe the line of the "comic" premise). This fact is betrayed at the end when the characters are trying to explain the situation and they cannot remember all the reasons for the various burials--the reasons are not reiterated here because they were not compelling reasons. Also, the characters can hear the cars in the town from where they are burying Harry, so the spot must be very close, and yet no one ever sees them going up and down the hill with shovels. Also, the spot is traversed by 40 zillion people in the wildly implausible opening scene, and then remains relatively deserted for the rest of the film. How lucky. With some exceptions, only the folks who are going up there to deal with Harry go there. I guess the two main problems for me, then, were these: the story is annoyingly implausible in many ways and the jokes are simply not funny. Most of Hitchcock's films contain a lot of humor, and almost always humor that is much, much better than the humor in The Trouble With Harry. That whispering of "double bed" joke that caps the film says it all, I think--this film is lame.
Help me out! Am I wrong about this movie? Will someone please point out what redeeming qualities, if any, this movie possesses?
Help me out! Am I wrong about this movie? Will someone please point out what redeeming qualities, if any, this movie possesses?