BEFORE: Linking from "To Catch a Thief" Cary Grant was also in the film "Sylvia Scarlett" with Edmund Gwenn (last seen in "Foreign Correspondent"). Oh yeah, and the director rode on a bus last night and walks across the screen again tonight. What a hambone that guy was.
THE PLOT: The trouble with Harry is that he's dead, and everyone seems to have a different idea of what needs to be done with his body...
AFTER: If I didn't know any better, I'd think that Hitchcock was almost trying to make a comedy out of this one. A dark comedy, sure, but still a comedy.
Another case of great timing tonight, because just as "Rear Window" was about the connections between people on a NYC block, this one's about life in a small New England town, and I'm headed up that way myself tomorrow night. Even though I grew up in a suburban town and not a rural one, it still had that quaint feel that maybe everyone in the town knew everyone else, or at least we all weren't too many degrees of separation away from each other. We had community theater, bowling alleys (OK, the next town over had that), and not too many chain restaurants or shopping centers.
But the town portrayed in this film is quite rural, the kind of town with a general store (where you can't buy anything specific) and roadside stands, one police officer and one doctor. Into this mix is thrown a corpse named Harry, and the first assumption made by the man who finds him is that he's the victim of a hunting accident. As time wears on and different people stumble on the body (sometimes quite literally), the method of his death becomes more and more unclear.
This eventually comes to resemble something like an episode of "CSI", where we gradually learn the events of the last day of Harry's life, and as more evidence is reveals, we're better able to reconstruct said day. The problem is that proving each point means digging up the body again, and then once each point is made, it gives another person reason to want to bury him again. If this is your idea of high comedy, well, good on you, but I didn't think all this was particularly funny.
Especially since we all know that going to the police earlier probably would have cleared up a number of things, and would have been the right thing to do. Again it seems like Hitchcock's characters tend to take the long way around when it comes to doing things, and I tend to find that most times, people tend to take the path of least resistance. But then if movie characters did that, movies would be a whole lot shorter.
And when someone finds a body in the woods, I doubt that a very common reaction would be to sketch it. That just seems odd, even for an artist.
Also starring John Forsythe (last seen in "In Cold Blood"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Bewitched"), Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, Royal Dano, and Jerry Mathers as "The Beaver".
RATING: 5 out of 10 shovels
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