Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Let me explain the title before the review. Weekend at Bernie's was a 1989 comedy involving two low end employees who inherit the care of their dead boss. The two panic stricken guys try to give the illusion of keeping him alive from the real killers. That ruse took a whole weekend. The Trouble With Harry, a delightful dark comedy only took one entire autumn day. Opening scenes show the breathtaking landscape of Northern New England beautifully photographed. The long-lived Captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is spending his mornings in the picturesque hills of Vermont's Green Mountains hunting for rabbits. Next the Captain fires three shots and comes to a clearing hoping for game. To his horror he sees a well dressed man lifeless on the ground. A few moments later little Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers) walks up the body, examines it and continues walking on then runs off. We presume little Arnie will tell his Mother. Hiding off to the side, Captain Wiles wants to move the corpse but others stumble upon the body. Even the bespectacled, nerdy Dr. Greenbow trips over the body as Captain Wiles quips," Couldn't have had more people here if I'd sold tickets." The Captain continues on, "Next thing you know they'll be televising the whole thing." One person who sees the Captain at the scene is spinster Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) who vows to keep his unfortunate secret. The Captain meets with Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) coincidentally the widow of Harry who doesn't seem to care he's dead. Another person who gets involved with Harry is struggling Artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) as Captain Wiles tells the whole events how he killed this man strictly by accident in detail. This accidental death brings our four quirky down to earth characters together. These four will spend much of the movie determining what to do with Harry or what's left of him. Just get a pair of gloves and two good shovels and start digging. The film is shot in glorious color. Hitchcock captures the Vermont countryside with the fall foliage in full bloom. The chemistry between the actors was so natural as Forsthye was the man of reason behind this wild escapade of hiding a dead body in this innocent looking New England village. I didn't realize that this was Shirley MacLaine's first movie role. Love the comedic dialogue with MacLaine's cadence against Captain Wiles with his hilarious comebacks as Jennifer's says, "I've never been to a homemade funeral before." The elderly Captain Wiles replies, I have...It's my third, All in one day." Speaking of funerals, This was Gwenn's second to last film before he passed at the age of 81. Just a delightful comedy over a grave situation as our four discover that it "Aint over till it's over."

I'm going to keep my review short. I enjoyed this film, and found enough humor mixed with a fairly good plot line. I think the film is worth watching, and a must for any Hitchcock fan. However a significant theme of the movie in the beginning that I enjoyed was how nonchalant everyone acted about Harry's death/dead body. And it does continue throughout the movie, with characters shrugging off the troubles, and acting as if it's a slight inconvenience. However in the beginning everyone that stumbles up to Harry's' body hilariously doesn't care, but later it's discovered that's they already knew, and were pretending. This ruined the earlier jokes for me, and made the film less funny to me from then on. 7/10

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY is probably the most atypical Hitchcock film I've seen so far. While it does have a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, the overall story is less than the sum of its parts. The basic story is that Harry is found dead in the woods, and a small group of people have trouble deciding what to do with his body. What the film does well is mining humor from the various situations arising from finding a dead body. Given that the subject matter is kind of grotesque, this results in more chuckles than outright guffaws. Fortunately, I thought the characters were also interesting, if a little underwritten. Shirley MacLaine did well in her first big screen role, and Edmund Gwynn (Kris Kringle in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET) was also rather entertaining to watch. I also thought that the tonal shifts, while a little odd at first, gave the film a quirky air that I grew to like. An example of how this plays out is in conversations that originally revolve around Harry, but then rather cavalierly shift to other, more banal, romantic comedy territory. If James Stewart and Grace Kelly coming together over a potential murder in REAR WINDOW was weird, two couples doing the same thing over a dead body for essentially the entire film here was downright odd. Ultimately, though, where the narrative ends up isn't as interesting as the journey taken to get there, and is a little underwhelming as a result. This isn't one of Hitchcock's greatest films, but it did provide a refreshing change of pace.

In 1952 Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac published a novel entitled Celle qui n'etait plus (She Who Was Not) somehow it came to Hitchcock's attention and seeing the potential for a film he tried to buy the rights but was beaten by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Hitch had more luck with another Boileau-Narcejac title D'entre les morts (1954) which he turned into Vertigo. However he was not only an indifferent film maker but a bad loser so he shot Celle qui n'etait plus anyway and released it the same year as Clouzot released his version, Les Diaboliques. In a clumsy attempt to muddy the water Hitch shot The Trouble With Harry as ho-hum comedy rather than the classic thriller that Clouzot released as Les Diaboliques. By far the best thing about Harry is the location shooting in Vermont. The casting was eclectic to say the least with acting honours shared between the two great Mildreds - Natwick and Dunnock - of American stage and screen, Edmund Gwenn phoning in his 'quaint' persona, Royal Dano about as far East as he can get from his natural habitat the Western and two mediocre efforts from John Forsyth and Shirley MacLaine. The peripatetic corpse is present in both films and for good measure Hitch has Harry end up in the bathtub as did Paul Meurisse. See it for the foliage