The Trouble With Harry
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *The Trouble With Harry * (1955) on Wednesday, November 27, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
So, what’s the deal withThe Trouble With Harry? It was only a matter of time until we got around to showing a Hitch (*Psycho II *doesn’t quite count), and you know we couldn’t just go for one of his most-cited classics like Rear Window or Vertigo. In fact, like the poster says, this is truly the “unexpected” from Hitchcock, in that it is not a high tension thriller or plotty caper. Instead, it’s the coziest small town comedy about a dead body that you could possibly find. Hitchcock hilariously subverts the murder mystery for the land of puritan guilt; the trouble with the titular Harry, found dead on the leaf-strewn Vermont hillside, is that everyone that finds him suspects that they were the one that murdered him.
The Trouble With Harry is perfect for the From Below, and perfect for the season. Featuring some of the best shots of New England foliage in technicolor, Harry ties into pet interests of both Stefan and Charlie. On Stefan’s side, we are returning to the question of humic cinema explored in films like This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection from earlier this year: what does it mean to be buried, to be exhumed, and to capture that experience on film? What kind of community is created through the burial process? Whereas This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection explores these issues from a sensorial, phenomenological approach, Hitchcock’s film has a bit of a more farcical tone. From Charlie’s side, we have another entry in the canon of Small Town Crime movies. As opposed to films like Prime Cut and *The Chase *featured in our Main Street Malfeasance series, which seek to expose the tyrannical impulses found in rural despots and ordinary folks alike, The Trouble With Harry delves into the flip side of this equation, capturing the anxieties of guilt that we carry around us, made more entangled in a small community. As Charlie remarked upon watching The Trouble With Harry for the first time, “this is basically how many of my relatives back home would react if they found a dead body.”
We hope to kick off the holiday season with you and this delightful corpse comedy!