The trou­ble with Harry

We might have come across the sit­u­a­tions like this. 5 famous French-bearded friends hap­pen to trans­port a corpse [ Pan­chathand­hi­ram ], 3 ladies hav­ing trou­ble with a corpse [ Mag­a­lir Mat­tum ] and a housewife’s prob­lem of hid­ing a dead body [ Ponnu Map­pil­lai ]. Even, I have seen a com­edy ser­ial based on mix­ing up n shift­ing a big potato bag and a bag con­tain­ing a corpse [ Here’s Crazy in DD ].  How­ever, the ear­lier con­nec­tion in Eng­lish films, where a film is writ­ten with a corpse as a cen­tral theme could be this film of Alfred Hitchcock’s.

The most sen­ti­men­tal thriller film of Hitch­cock was ‘The wrong man’ and in the reverse it is ‘The trou­ble with Harry’ — prob­a­bly next to the ‘Family Plot’. 

Plot

The exact trou­ble of Harry is his death :)  A dead body is found in a remote hill­top vil­lage. Var­i­ous peo­ple see this corpse and have their own con­nec­tions with the corpse, along with their imag­i­na­tions. A small boy, his mother, rab­bit hunt­ing sea cap­tain, another lady, a doc­tor, an insane man and the painter are the peo­ple who hap­pen to come across this corpse at var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. Some of them claim that they are respon­si­ble for the mur­der of the dead body. What they do with the dead body and how the mys­tery gets resolved is told in a humorous way.

View

The story opens with 3 gun shots in a hill­top. I could draw sim­i­lar­ity between this story and the “Andha Naall” except Andha Naal was seri­ous. As any good film I have seen, the story starts at the very first shot [ gun­shot too :) ]. Unlike the films of that period, it is shot in exotic loca­tions of Ver­mont – a scenic land­scape location.

The inter­est­ing aspect of the film is the vari­ety of the char­ac­ters. When watched closely, all the char­ac­ters have their good part in mak­ing the story to move a bit. This includes the brief char­ac­ters like the kid, the insane per­son, the absent minded doc­tor and the mil­lion­aire. The twists and the turns are aptly planted in the story so that they don’t look cheap or made for the sake of thrilling.

The inter­est­ing thing about reac­tions of the char­ac­ters towards the corpse — none of them scream as shown in our Tamil cin­ema. I still don’t under­stand the con­cept of scream cov­ered with the back­hand [ of course, the “veeeel” sound too :) ]. Even the tiny ele­ments like a car, paint­ings, and shoes of the corpse play tiny roles in the script. This is really an unusual film from Alfred Hitchcock’s bag. He is one of the very few direc­tors in the world who can claim that he has made a DIFFERENT film.

Hitchcock’s films are com­pul­sively atten­tion grab­bing because of this process of pic­tur­is­ing them. They get a novel in the first place; write screen­play based on the novel and finally get the shape of a film’s for­mat. So Hitch­cock doesn’t have his per­sonal prob­lems reflect­ing in the movie like Saketh raman’s depart­ing from his fam­ily and plant­ing Maalai neram song in AO.

Happy watch­ing.

:)

Toto.

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