The Trouble with Harry (1955)
When I first saw this years ago it was on a little television screen and the whole experience left me baffled. I saw it this time on a large, good quality projection and I had the same experience. What a frivolous, boring movie!
It has charms, for sure, including the whole exaggerated Vermont setting in all its idyllic small town beauty. (The movie premiered in Barre, Vermont.) And it is, truly, lightly humorous throughout, so yes, call it a comedy. But so little happens it gets maddening. It feels mostly like a Hitchcock Presents television production stretched into a full length movie. It's not a coincidence that the premier of that t.v. series was October, 1955, just as filming was under way for The Trouble with Harry. Initial shooting took a month that fall, with some later fill-in shooting at the end of the year.
Here Hitchcock uses (with great fanfare) the new Vistavision very widescreen format, and full Technicolor. You might think the movie was just a way to dip into the mid 1950s revelation in big, colorful cinema. And along those lines, cinematographer Robert Burks makes the most of autumn in Vermont with some beautiful location shooting. And the ticklish music by Bernard Herrmann is, as usual, perfect. Burks was already a longtime favorite of Hitchcock, but this was the first of many collaborations with Herrmann.
But the plot, and the acting (including a couple of respectable names like Shirley MacLaine, though Hitchcock hasn't always wanted the very best from his women leads) are flat and slow. Suspense? Not a bit. That's not the point. The movie flopped here in the U.S. but was a success in the U.K. so maybe, just maybe, we Yanks just don't get the humor.
When I first saw this years ago it was on a little television screen and the whole experience left me baffled. I saw it this time on a large, good quality projection and I had the same experience. What a frivolous, boring movie!
It has charms, for sure, including the whole exaggerated Vermont setting in all its idyllic small town beauty. (The movie premiered in Barre, Vermont.) And it is, truly, lightly humorous throughout, so yes, call it a comedy. But so little happens it gets maddening. It feels mostly like a Hitchcock Presents television production stretched into a full length movie. It's not a coincidence that the premier of that t.v. series was October, 1955, just as filming was under way for The Trouble with Harry. Initial shooting took a month that fall, with some later fill-in shooting at the end of the year.
Here Hitchcock uses (with great fanfare) the new Vistavision very widescreen format, and full Technicolor. You might think the movie was just a way to dip into the mid 1950s revelation in big, colorful cinema. And along those lines, cinematographer Robert Burks makes the most of autumn in Vermont with some beautiful location shooting. And the ticklish music by Bernard Herrmann is, as usual, perfect. Burks was already a longtime favorite of Hitchcock, but this was the first of many collaborations with Herrmann.
But the plot, and the acting (including a couple of respectable names like Shirley MacLaine, though Hitchcock hasn't always wanted the very best from his women leads) are flat and slow. Suspense? Not a bit. That's not the point. The movie flopped here in the U.S. but was a success in the U.K. so maybe, just maybe, we Yanks just don't get the humor.