CRAFTSBURY – This year marks the 70th anniversary of the making of “The Trouble With Harry,” the delightful Alfred Hitchcock film that was shot mostly around Craftsbury in September of 1954.
The Craftsbury Historical Society celebrated this event by showing the movie on Sunday, Sept. 8, at the Craftsbury Public Library, with a packed audience in attendance.
President of the society, Don Houghton, introduced Rick Winston of East Calais/Adamant to give historical context to the work. He is a life-long officianado of the cinema, starting and running the Savoy Theater in Montpelier from 1981 to 2009, which has offered excellent contemporary movies for many years, a founder of the Green Mountain Film Festival, and the author of “Save Me A Seat” (a life in films) and “Red Scare in the Green Mountains” (about the McCarthy era).
“The Trouble With Harry” is basically an English comedy transplanted to new England, with a superabundance of understated English humor and absurdity. Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) chose Craftsbury as a quintessential Vermont village and set it in the early fall with beautiful autumn foliage in the background. The imaginative script writer, John Michael Hayes, was undoubtedly influenced by a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Wrong Box,” which has a similar ridiculous situation of repeated burials turned into a film in 1966 with an all-star cast including Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore and Michael Caine.
The sites around Craftsbury utilized for the movie, which visitors to the area sometimes ask about, were on Craftsbury Common, where Wiggs Emporium, a fictional local store, was just a constructed facade, and East Craftsbury, where a front porch was added to the church parsonage for the home of one of the characters. All the inside takes were done in makeshift studios. Other places used were Greenwood Lake in Woodbury (the Captain’s home) and East Corinth (a classic village overview).
The foliage season ended prematurely that fall, necessitating some made-up backdrops with cut off branches and bags of colored leaves.
Curiously, the film was not initially a box office success, for as Rick Winston framed it, compared to Hitchcock’s previous movies, “Audiences were expecting Agatha Christie and they got Samuel Beckett!”
This author remembers seeing “The Trouble With Harry” when it first came out in 1955, and it has remained one of my favorite films, always hilarious and immensely entertaining.
The cast was superlatively chosen by Hitchcock: John Forsythe was the painter Sammy Marlowe, Shirley MacLaine the single mother Jennifer Rogers, former wife of Harry, Jerry Mathews her son Arnie (only seven-years old at the time), Edmund Gwenn the sea captain Miles (79 years old then), Mildred Dunnock as Mrs. Wiggs the store owner, and Mildred Natwick an older woman as Miss Gravely. All these actors and actresses had long careers in the movies. Bernard Herrmann composed the musical score, which is consistently appropriate. Hitchcock himself began making films in 1926 and produced 54 of them in his lifetime, many of them still classics of the media. He described his movies as “a mixture of mayhem, mischief and the macabre.”
The plot is basically simple in the beginning of the picture, but rapidly becomes wonderfully convoluted. Captain Miles is hunting rabbits in the autumn woods and fires three shots. Then a very young boy, Arnie, comes along and discovers a dead man lying on the ground, with some blood on his forehead, and he runs home. Captain Miles appears and thinks he has shot the man by accident. Then Miss Gravely wanders by and politely querries the Captain what he is going to do with the body after he explains what he guesses had happened. They hide behind a tree when an absent minded doctor reading and reciting a book rips over the body but doesn’t take any notice of it. A tramp follows next, stealing the dead man’s nice pair of shoes. A local artist, Sammy Marlow, visits the site later and draws a pastel sketch of the corpse’s face. Marlow subsequently visits Mrs. Rogers (in East Craftsbury) and in the course of their conversation she reveals that the dead man was her former estranged husband, Harry, who she had fled from after their very short marriage. He had found where she lived and was aggressively insisting on reviving their relationship, and she repelled his advances by hitting him on the head with a milk bottle.
In time, Miss Gravely confessed to Captain Miles that Harry had also attacked her, convinced that she was his wife, and she had hit him in the head with the metal clad heel of one of her shoes. What is consistently absurd and comic about all of these characters is that they don’t react in the normal way when confronted with a dead body, they are all quite nonchalant and indifferent, even though they may have caused his death. Above all, no one really intends to go to the local police and end up in the papers. As a result, they just want to bury Harry and forget the whole thing, so that he ends up being buried where he was found, but then on reconsideration dug up several times again. Thus these very different individuals, who hardly knew each other beforehand, are drawn together for a common purpose, and two love relationships simultaneously emerge, between Marlowe and Mrs. Rogers and Captain Miles and Miss Gravely.
A discussion after the film with Rick Winton answered some of the audience’s questions. The film took about a month-plus to make in Craftsbury, with Hitchcock staying in Stowe, probably at the Green Mountain Inn, and he enjoyed a favorite restaurant in Barre, the Country Home. Francis Truffant, in his fascinating book interviewing Hitchcock, said that any man who creates fear in others must be fearful himself, which made Hitchcock want to have control over everything, and he was most happy when there was complete order on the set. His wife, Alma Revill, collaborated with him from the beginning in every major production. A question not asked at the showing but might be curious to explore the memories of older Craftsbury residents, was whether Miss Jean Simpson, the grande dame of East Craftsbury, played any part in this project at the time, since she was so active in theater all her life.
David K. Rodgers
