Being a Hitchcock aficionado, I couldn’t resist this odd little film shown late on Net 5 last night even though it wasn’t at all typical of the director’s usual genre or that highly rated. Although the movie’s central character ‘Harry’ is a corpse and the film sets out to find out what happened to him, that’s where the typical Hitchcockian murder mystery suspense theme ends…

The Trouble With Harry was made as a black comedy; though never hilarious and, only at times, bordering on amusing. Suspense is replaced by nonchalance as a series of villagers in rural Vermont stumble across Harry’s body. Each somehow feel responsible for his death. But are not bothered by it either.

Bizarrely perhaps, it was made in between two of his most enjoyable movies – To Catch A Thief (1955) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, American version). And is quite clearly a self-indulgent outing on Hitchcock’s part: ‘To my taste, the humour is quite rich’, the director said when interviewed by Fran’ois Truffaut. ‘One of the best lines is when old Edmund Gwenn is dragging the body along for the first time and a woman comes up to him and says, “What seems to be the trouble, Captain?”. To me that’s terribly funny; that’s the spirit of the whole story.’

And that’s about as um… funny as it gets.

That said it does have its attributes: it was Shirley MacLaine’s debut film, it affords an insight into Hitchock’s humour, it’s shot in vivid ‘autumnal’ technicolor with some beautiful cinematography and it was the first time Bernard Hermann composed a score for Hitchcock. (At times it is vaguely reminiscent of the score he wrote for Vertigo.) But, apart from die-hard Hitchcock fans (his cameo appearance by the way is when he walks past the parked limousine of an old man looking at paintings), it’s not particularly worth watching.

However, for those in the Netherlands and fans of the master of suspense: next week’s Net 5 offering is Marnie (1964) starring Sean Connery and, of course, Tippi Hedren (The Birds, 1963). Friday 26 September, 11.50pm.

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