The Trouble with Harry

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

1955 / 99min / DCP

The inconvenient corpse, imbued with a sense of tragedy and terror in Hitchcock’s Rope, is the source of borderline-surrealist farce in The Trouble with Harry, his adaptation of Jack Trevor Story’s novel of the same name, a darkly comic tale in which the residents of a small New England hamlet—exteriors were shot on location in Vermont, with the fall foliage radiant in Technicolor—try and repeatedly fail to dispose of a dead body that has appeared in their midst. A rare foray into comedy (albeit of the black variety) for Hitchcock, with Shirley MacLaine, Mildred Natwick, and Jerry “The Beaver” Mathers perfectly embodying a bevy of smalltown American “types.”