The Trouble with Harry

When I reviewed Hitchcock's Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I said that it was the biggest outlier in his filmography, as it was (ostensibly) a straight-forward comedy. I also said that, as great of a director as he is, Smith shows comedy was outside Hitchcock's wheelhouse. He has touches of gallows humor in his movies, sure, but that's not the same as making a full-on, credit-to-credit comedy. Smith, which was trying to be a screwball rom-com, could not find its footing. So when I looked deeper into The Trouble With Harry and saw it was supposed to also be a comedy, but more of a dark comedy, I was curious, but skeptical. Sadly, my skepticism had merit, as Trouble did not show me Smith was a one-off. Hitchcock may have been a master, but comedy, of any kind, was not a nut he could crack. The problems with Trouble come from two aspects that are deeply intertwined: pacing and atmosphere. Trouble is set in a small town in Vermont, where a dead body is found in the woods (the titular Harry), and a number of people all think they may have been the one to accidentally kill him. Logically, then, the movie would be about the comic mishaps as these four people discover the body, discover each other, argue about who did it, and try to hide their potential involvement in it. Setting it in a small New England town is supposed to provide humorous contrast. Murder, in the middle of nowhere, where everybody knows everybody? Gasp! Shock! Even in the era of the Hays Code, the idea writes itself. If Arsenic and Old Lace could do it, so could Hitchcock ... right? Unfortunately, it seems like shooting on location in the sleepy hamlets of Vermont had an effect on the movie. I didn't know until watching this that "pastoral" and "bucolic" could be used to describe a movie's pacing and sense of humor, but here we are. Hitchcock was so enchanted with the cozy atmosphere of the rolling hills and fall foliage, it infects the movie's sensibilties. I would say it slows down the pace, but that would be a lie, because it would insinuate the movie has a pace to begin with. This is the first movie I can think of where its pacing could be described as "loitering". To be clear, I didn't expect some Airplane-style zinger-a-minute laugh riot kind of movie. Hitchcock and punchlines go together like steak and motor oil. His humor is more dry and ironic, a wry twist of the knife. But Trouble doesn't twist the knife. It uses the knife to spread butter on a warm dinner roll for you. Trouble is so enamored with being quaint, it can't muster up the piss and vinegar that a dark comedy needs to be, well, comedic and dark. There is no bite to this movie, no darkness at its core that feels like a mockery of human nature. Hitchcock seemed to think merely setting the movie in the middle of nowhere and having a cast of quirky characters would be enough to carry the day, but it isn't. That cast is the other problem of Trouble. Not the actors, no, its the characters themselves, and to talk about it, I again have to mention Arsenic and Old Lace. That cast is full of wild, zany characters; the two kindly spinsters who have a dozen bodies buried in shallow graves in the basement, a nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, another prodigal nephew that is a serial killer with bad plastic surgery that makes him look like Karloff's Frankenstein's monster, the wormy doctor ... and then, in the middle of it all, straight-as-an-arrow Cary Grant, stuck pinballing off all this insanity. Trouble's cast is full of characters with quirks and charms, but there isn't a straight to bounce off this insane situation. If there isn't going to be a straight, then everybody needs to be amped up, like The War Of The Roses. Instead, Trouble takes the third path; everybody is whimsical and quaint. There's no panic, no urgency, no energy. The humor is entirely dependent on the setting and the main foursome having some polite confusion that, if you didn't know it was about a corpse, could be about anything. Confusion over where dinner reservations are, or who misplaced the car keys. It's a shame, too, because the movie itself is stunning to look at, and the performances are enjoyable. But what should be a hilariously grim comes off unfinished and unsure of itself, relying on elements that cannot carry the weight of comedy on their own. I admire the effort, but Trouble wants to be something it isn't, and makes no attempt to earn it, settling for being a very pretty travelogue for the state of Vermont with an awkward movie stapled to it.