The body in the Vermont woods is the oldest joke in the picture, and it still works. When Alfred Hitchcock brought his camera crews to Vermont, he was not chasing suspense. He was chasing autumn — the particular, almost absurd New England light that turns a hillside maple into something you would frame. The film that came out of it, The Trouble with Harry, is the odd one out in the Hitchcock canon: a black comedy in Technicolor about a dead man, a handful of neighbors who each believe they might have killed him, and the increasingly complicated question of what to do with the body. Seventy-odd years later, the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro is bringing it back twice — first as a live screenplay reading on Friday, Oct. 23, and then as a film screening with a community conversation on Sunday, Nov. 8.
The Latchis, at 50 Main Street, is a fitting host. Its Art Deco auditorium is one of Vermont's grand old movie palaces still showing films, and its programming leans hard on the idea that cinema is a communal act rather than a private one. The Oct. 23 event is billed as "From Hitchcock to Brattleboro: The Trouble with Harry Live Screenplay Reading" — actors at the front of the room, scripts in hand, working through John Michael Hayes's adaptation of Jack Trevor Story's 1949 novel. The Nov. 8 event pairs the finished film with a conversation, which is where the local-history angle gets its due.
That history starts with a phone call. According to the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, when word got out that producer Herbert Coleman was scouting a New England backdrop for Hitchcock's next picture, his office heard from Clifford Miskelley, then director of the Vermont Development Commission, complaining that Vermont had not been considered. It hadn't. Coleman had been surveying southern New Hampshire and the country around Lake Winnipesaukee. He agreed to meet Miskelley in White River Junction, and Miskelley drove him north toward Montpelier. The views along the way, Coleman later said, "dismissed from my mind Peterborough, Keene, and all the other places we'd covered." Coleman described a scene that mattered to the film — a giant maple with, in his words, "the landscape falling away in every direction." Miskelley drove him straight to a spot in East Craftsbury. "It was exactly right," Coleman remembered.
So the picture was made in and around Craftsbury Common, in Orleans County, in the far northeast of the state — a village of white clapboard and a green and not much else, which is precisely the point. The film's comedy depends on decorum: everyone is terribly polite about the corpse. Edmund Gwenn, who had been Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street a decade earlier, plays a retired sea captain who is fairly sure he shot Harry. Mildred Natwick is a spinster who is fairly sure she hit him with a shoe. John Forsythe is the painter who keeps finding the body and moving it. And a young Shirley MacLaine, in her first film role, plays the dead man's young widow, who is not especially broken up about it. Jerry Mathers, later of Leave It to Beaver, appears as a small boy who stumbles on Harry in the opening shot.
The film is also a landmark for reasons that have nothing to do with Vermont. It was the first of Hitchcock's collaborations with composer Bernard Herrmann, the partnership that would go on to produce the scores for Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and Marnie. Herrmann's music for Harry is a lilting, almost teasing waltz — nothing like the shrieking strings that would define his later work, but the beginning of one of the most consequential composer-director relationships in American film. The picture was shot in Technicolor by Robert Burks, another Hitchcock regular, and it is one of the few Hitchcock films in which the landscape is allowed to be beautiful for its own sake.
It was not, at the time, a hit. The Trouble with Harry was released in the United States on Sept. 30, 1955, on a budget of about $1.2 million, and it did modest business — the dark comedy was a harder sell than the thrillers audiences expected from the man whose silhouette introduced his television show. It was re-released in 1984, and its reputation has climbed steadily since; it is now regarded as one of Hitchcock's most underrated films and one of the driest comedies Hollywood made in the 1950s.
But before any of that, there was the premiere, and the premiere was in Vermont. Hitchcock and MacLaine came to Barre in late September 1955 for the world premiere of the film at the Paramount Theater on North Main Street, where the director's famous profile had been drawn on the wall and where, to the delight of fans and reporters, he signed it with a flourish. The city council named him an honorary citizen of the Granite City and, not stopping there, declared him an honorary mayor. The director and his star were guests of honor at a gala at the Memorial Auditorium before the first screening. It is hard to imagine a comparable homecoming for a Hollywood picture today — a village standing in for an entire genre of American small-town life, and then the town throwing a party for the man who filmed it.
That is the thread the Latchis is pulling on. The Oct. 23 reading and the Nov. 8 screening are part of "Hollywood, VT," a series built around Vermont-connected stories shown on Vermont screens — the kind of programming that treats the state not as a backdrop but as a character. The series has also run at the Playhouse in Randolph, and its premise is simple enough: a great many films have been made in and about Vermont, and most of them are better seen with a room full of people who know the roads.
The Trouble with Harry rewards that treatment. It is a film about a community deciding, collectively and with exquisite manners, not to make a fuss — a premise that plays differently in a state where the local grapevine is the primary news medium. The screenplay is funny on the page and funnier out loud, which is presumably the bet behind the live reading. And the film itself, whatever its cool reception in 1955, has aged into something like a document: the Craftsbury hillsides, the white houses, the long shadows of a Vermont October, captured by a director who came for the foliage and stayed for the joke.
Tickets for both events are available through the Latchis. The live screenplay reading is Friday, Oct. 23; the film screening and community conversation is Sunday, Nov. 8. The theatre is at 50 Main Street in Brattleboro.