One of the many magnificent qualities of Turner Classic Movies is its ability to acquaint modern audiences, especially the younger crowds who hold no concept of who John Ford is and cannot recognize a Bernard Herrmann score when they hear one, with pictures from an era in Hollywood which has been relegated to the pages of movie history. TCM can be likened to a library full of dusty old books which have been patiently waiting to be discovered by the minds of contemporary readers.

In some cases, Mr. Turner’s ode to the films of yesteryear sometimes allows its clientele to become once again familiar with those movies from a specific director’s canon which one may have forgotten present such an indelible point in that filmmaker’s career. This occurred to me quite recently. Finding my way onto TCM one evening, I found myself immersed in the Alfred Hitchcock comedy of murder and understatement entitled The Trouble with Harry. This film did not present new territory for me in terms of the Master of Suspense’s body of work, as this little gem of a picture is one which I have been familiar with for quite some time. Yet, it had been many years since I had viewed the picture.

In terms of Hitchcock, I had been consumed by his more notable films, be it Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, or Notorious. But that whole time, The Trouble with Harry was waiting to be re-discovered. Thankfully, to TCM, the rediscovery occurred and with it a new appreciation for this fine little film. The Trouble with Harry is unique among the films of Hitchcock because it is fully comedic in its nature. This is not to say Hitchcock never made comedies or that his films, underneath their suspenseful and macabre moods, did not have an element of amusement to them. The opposite is true, in fact. Hitchcock’s films are often very funny and amusing. North By Northwest, for example, could be considered a “spy-comedy” due to the great one-liners and often comedic situations in which Cary Grant finds himself. Rear Window features numerous instances of comedic banter between the crippled James Stewart and his nurse played by Thelma Ritter. Hitchcock himself even delivered with a perfect dead-pan delivery the humorous introductions to his own Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But while these films, and one great television show, contain an overall mood of suspense, The Trouble with Harry is light, whimsical, and hysterical and is not out to make the audience frightened.

Even though its premise contains typical Hitchcock characteristics, including the presence of murder, the approach this time by the director is much more tongue-in-cheek, emphasizing creating humor instead of engineering suspense. Hitchcock opens his film in the gorgeous autumn setting of a New England town. The beauty of the scenery lies in stark contrast to the presence of a dead body on the leaf-covered ground which is found by a little boy named Arnie (played by Jerry Mathers, later to be known as Beaver Cleaver). The dead body is Harry of the title and the trouble with him is that no one knows how he has died but everyone thinks they may have been responsible for his untimely demise. The aging and worrisome Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, better known to you as Santa Clause from Miracle on 34th Street) believes a stray bullet from his hunting rifle may have done Harry in. The sophisticated and polite Miss Gravely also thinks she may have killed Harry with a blow from her hiking shoe. The two conspire to get rid of the body and obtain the help of a young artist in the town named Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe, better known as the voice of Charlie from Charlie’s Angels) and Arnie’s young mother Jennifer played by a wonderful Shirley MacLaine, here in her film debut. Jennifer, it turns out, is Harry’s wife and she too thinks she may have caused his death. What follows is an entertaining romp featuring the quartet burying, digging-up, and burying Harry over and over again while trying to avoid the suspicions of the town sheriff, Calvin Wiggs.

Romance also blossoms between Captain Wiles and Miss Gravely and Jennifer and Sam. The most entertaining aspect of The Trouble with Harry is the lack of concern everyone seems to have for Harry. The cast seems to care less that a human being has died. They are more concerned about hiding the fact that they may have killed Harry and finding a safe way to get rid of his body. This leads to Hitchcock displaying a wonderful sense of dry humor by way of understated dialogue by his principle characters. For example, when Miss Gravely stumbles across Captain Wiles dragging Harry’s body across the ground for burial, she simply remarks with an air of understated humor, “What seems to be the trouble, Captain?” In another instance, Jennifer remarks about her dead husband that he “looked exactly the same alive, only he was vertical.” When trying to get to Harry’s corpse in order to bury it, Captain Wiles offers one of the funniest lines in the film when, as he watches people walk by Harry’s body and not notice it, remarks, “Couldn’t have had more people here if I’d sold tickets.” Moments like these provide The Trouble with Harry with plentiful chuckles. The humor in the film causes it to fall into the category of being a “black comedy”, as the wit at the basis of the picture revolves around a murdered person. But that humor is executed (no pun intended) with such low key precision courtesy of Hitchcock by way of the dialogue of his actors that the film cannot be seen as a “murder mystery”, but as a comedy which happens to feature a dead man.

Historically, The Trouble with Harry came at a point in Hitchcock’s career when he was churning out memorable picture after memorable picture. In a span of three years, Hitchcock released not only this film, but Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. This signifies one of the most productive periods by a director in American cinema (one could also cite John Ford and the short amount of time in which he made Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, and The Grapes of Wrath). The film also marks the debut of Bernard Herrman’s powerful scores as an instrumental presence in the Hitchcock canon.

Upon release, the film, according to most accounts, was a box-office disappointment. Over fifty years later, however, The Trouble with Harry, like other Hitchcock films (most notably Vertigo) has received a new life on DVD and VHS and critical praise from historians, such as Donald Spoto, who published a positive analysis of the film in his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. A distinct mark in Hitchcock’s career, The Trouble with Harry is an ideal example of the wicked humor Hitchcock loved to use in his projects and the range of his masterful directorial talents.