burying the
dead
by Douglas Messerli
John Michael Hayes (screenplay,
based on a novel by Jack Trevor), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Trouble with Harry / 1955
Soon after filming To Catch a Thief in the beautiful
Riviera landscape, Hitchcock and company were summoned to Vermont, location
experts claiming that the leaves were in their full fall color. The world
presented in the 1955 film, The Trouble
with Harry, could not be more different from that of the wealthy citizens
of Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes of the former movie. If guilt—guilt both for
having great wealth and guilt for stealing it from others—is a major theme of To Catch a Thief, the prelapsarian world
of upstate Vermont is one in which none of the small town citizens seemingly
has any money—and no reason, accordingly, for guilt.
Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), a retired captain, lives, as he puts it, in
a man’s world without any woman’s homey touches; his hunger for food, indeed,
begins the series of events at the center of the story. Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred
Dunnock) runs the local general store without even a cash register, with many
of her customers, such as artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), unable to pay
her; in an attempt to raise money for him and herself, she exhibits his
paintings alongside the vegetables and cider she sells to the few tourists
passing through town. Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) gets by, supporting
herself and her young son the best she can, on her dead first husband’s
insurance money.
We soon realize that for all but one of the town’s citizens, the lack of
money presents no real difficulties, as they barter for goods and services—Sam
promising his paintings as credit for his groceries, the young Arnie trading a
dead rabbit for a frog and two blueberry muffins—and are seemingly ready to
exchange whatever little they have with one another. Only Calvin Wiggs—whose
very name suggests the religious roots of American financial
“accomplishment”—is in search of money, working as a policeman by the “piece”
and attempting to sell remodeled antique cars. Calvin has what Sam describes as
a misunderstanding of art—not just of visual art, but a miscomprehension of the
art of living.
Even more remarkably, the citizens of this idyllic village seem to be
the most placidly content folk on the face of the earth. The fact that the
Captain has accidentally shot and killed a man in his hunt for a rabbit is met
with utter complacency by the near army of people who pass by the body lying in
the woods. As the Captain vaguely contemplates how to cover up his “crime,”
Miss Gravely greets him with friendly hauteur: “What seems to be the trouble,
Captain?” After explaining the situation
to her, she acceptingly replies, “If I were going to hide an accident, I
shouldn’t delay.” Indeed, not only is her demeanor imperturbable, but she uses
the opportunity of encountering the “murderer” to invite him for blueberry
muffins and coffee, with, perhaps, some
elderberry wine.
Arnie, the child who has originally discovered the fallen man, returns
with his mother in tow. Jennifer Rogers who not only complacently accepts the
reality of the man’s death, but seems absolutely elated by it; it is an act of
“providence,” she declares; the world has seen the last of Harry (we later
discover he was her second husband, brother to her first) as he lies in “a deep wonderful sleep.” When the child asks
if he will get better, she replies, “Not if we’re lucky.”
The local doctor, Greenbow, wandering the fields while reading
Shakespeare’s love sonnets, trips over the body, his near-sightedness allowing
him to not even recognize it as a dead man. A local tramp is delighted by the
discovery of the corpse which provides him with a new pair of
shoes.
As the captain notes, “Couldn’t have had more people here if I’d sold
tickets.” And, later, as the final witness to his supposed crime, Sam Marlowe,
is seen approaching, he quips, “Next thing you know they’ll be televising the
whole thing.” Sam, like the others, unruffled by the sight of a dead man,
simply takes out his drawing pad and charcoal to begin a sketch.
This general imperturbability of the film’s characters—the source also
of much of the picture’s dark humor—has been misunderstood by many otherwise
perceptive film critics such as Time Out’s
Geoff Andrew, as representing “British restraint” and a “discreet style” that
makes for “wooden” performances and “coy and awkward” situations.
As the excellent film critic
Lesley Brill has argued, however, the people of Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry are so in touch
with nature that death and resurrection is seen as absolutely natural: “Death
passes and life renews without effort or anxiety. The bland tone of The Trouble with Harry constitutes more
than comic technique; it results from a profound confidence that death lacks
the power to destroy and that hope can scarcely help but prosper.”
We soon discover that the dead figure at the center of this masterwork,
an outsider to this paradisiacal society, is named Harry Warp, and as quickly
as we learn his name we realize that in our interaction with the various
Vermont characters we have entered a sort of “time warp,” a world bent
differently from the one most of us inhabit, a place where—as the young Arnie
puts it—“today” is “tomorrow,” and “tomorrow” is “yesterday,” in short a world
without time, where past, present, and future come together to create a near
Edenic universe.
Upon the Captain’s question, “What time is it?” Sam looks to his empty
wrist and then to the sky, “I’d say about noon.” And from that instant forward,
Hitchcock weaves a sense of timelessness through his work as the major
characters, each intent upon resolving their relationships with the dead, bury
Harry, dig him up, bury him again, dig him up, and bury him once more, before
resurrecting the body, washing it, redressing it, and returning it one final
time to its original resting place in the open field where it was originally
discovered. Rather than resulting in what, in our fallen world, might be
negative consequences for their involvement, each of Harry’s resurrections
results in rewards for the members of this small funereal band.
In a series of absurd events, Jennifer Rogers has hit Harry over the
head with a milk bottle, in response to which the stunned man, stumbling about
the woods and determined to find his wife to restore his sexual rights,
encounters Miss Gravely, whom he attacks, she driving the heel of her shoe into
his head; meanwhile, the Captain, in search of prey, shoots three times. The
three major suspects in Harry’s “murder,” accordingly, are each forced to
lackadaisically address his or her connection to the corpse, to recount their
“trouble” with Harry.
With Sam’s help, the Captain attempts to hide the evidence of his crime;
but when he discerns that he is innocent (recalling that his first shot hit a
beer can, the second a sign, and the third Arnie’s rabbit), he is insistent
upon disinterring Harry. His reward, in turn, for that burial and resurrection
comes in the form of the restored Miss Gravely and their budding relationship.
Miss Gravely’s belief that she has killed him results in the Captain and
her returning to bury the body once more. Upon further reflection, however, and
with the recognition that in hiding her evidence she may lead the police to
find her guilty, she also demands Harry’s resurrection, which is rewarded,
perhaps, by the sale of Sam’s paintings to a millionaire. In this
non-capitalistic world of barter, however, Sam accepts payment by granting the
desires of his friends: a box of monthly strawberries to Jennifer, a smelly
chemistry set for Arnie, a chromium-plated cash register for Wiggy, a gun and
hunting outfit for the Captain, a hope chest “filled with hope” for Miss
Gravely, and a double bed for himself and Jennifer, his soon-to-be wife.
Later, when the group considers the fact that the somewhat seamy details
of Jennifer’s marriage to Harry may come out with the discovery of the body,
she is faced with the decision that leads to Harry’s third burial. But again,
new doubts arise as this small society recognizes that Jennifer will be unable
to marry Sam without the evidence of her second husband’s death, and the grave diggers,
appearing in the film like the “dance of death” figures of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (a film released two
years later), unbury the corpse one last time. After depositing the body in
Jennifer’s bathtub, they discover, upon the doctor’s investigation, that the
cause of death was a natural one: Harry simply had a bad heart.
We have already perceived, from Jennifer’s testament, that Harry was
heartless, with little appetite for the flesh she represents, while Sam, on the
other hand, is nearly ready to pounce. “I’d like to paint you in the nude,” he
announces upon their first meeting. Later, as he moves in for a kiss, she
commands: “Ignite me, Sam. I have a very short fuse.”
Freed now from any of the negative responses from the world outside
their own, and having nothing to hide (Brill points out the comic use
throughout The Trouble with Harry of
a door that repeatedly opens to reveal only an empty closet), these fortunate
few have successfully restored their world to the way “things happen(ed),”
revealing the course of nature. As Sam has argued early in the film, Harry’s
death is perhaps an “act of God,” “Heaven’s will…done.” Now filled with love for one another, the
four await the new day that is tomorrow, the yesterday that is today. As the
film’s end announces, “The trouble with Harry is over.”
Los Angeles, January 7, 2003
Reprinted
from My
Queer Cinema blog
(January 2003).
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