The Trouble with Harry (1955)

(On TV, May 2020) Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of a comedy isn’t the same as everyone else’s, and so The Trouble with Harry is all about what happens when a small New England community finds a dead body in the woods and tries to figure out what to do with it. In this film, a romantic subplot is given equal importance than an opening sequence in which nobody reacts in any conventional way at the presence of a corpse that several people they know may have murdered. It does have a bit of a pacing issue in its second half, partially redeemed by the pleasant climax of a group of people coming together to solve a problem. As darkly whimsical as Hitchcock could best be, The Trouble with Harry is as much a departure from his usual thrillers as it is a reaffirmation of his core strengths.