The movie that disappointed Alfred Hitchcock: “Some of my pictures have never quite been accepted”
Despite being the brains behind more than a couple of the greatest movies ever made, not every Alfred Hitchcock film was a guaranteed winner, although as always it was down to taste and personal preference at the end of the day.
Whether it was a critical drubbing, apathetic audiences failing to show up and buy a ticket, or the ‘Master of Suspense’ voicing regrets over his own work, there were a few misses to go along with an admittedly monstrous number of hits.
After all, it’s easy to forgive Hitchcock the odd misstep or two when he gave the world The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Notorious, Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief, The Birds, and even more besides.
It’s a filmography that few directors could even dream of coming close to replicating, but there were still times when Hitchcock was left dismayed by critics and audiences alike failing to share his enthusiasm. He was particularly fond of an unsung comedy, only to be left crushed by the way it was received.
“Some of my pictures have never quite been accepted, I’m afraid,” he lamented to Roger Ebert. “To this day, I’m still disappointed by the reception for The Trouble with Harry. It was an English-type comedy of the macabre, which I made in 1955, all about a body that gets dug up and buried four times.”
Shirley MacLaine heads up the cast as Jennifer Rogers, the ex-wife of the mysterious corpse who keeps popping up. The mystery engulfs the residents of a small town, who all harbour suspicions over the culprit responsible for the dead body that can’t seem to stay in the ground for very long.
It wasn’t universally panned nor was it a box office catastrophe, but Hitchcock was adamant The Trouble with Harry deserved the flowers it never ended up getting. Much more of a disappointment than a disaster, then, the auteur must have taken the muted response to heart looking at what happened after its initial theatrical run.
Once The Trouble with Harry finished up in cinemas, the rights immediately reverted back to Hitchcock, who rarely allowed it to be screened. Following his death in 1980, protracted negotiations between the late filmmaker’s estate and Universal eventually saw it re-released in 1983, where it underwent an appraisal as being one of his more unfairly overlooked pictures.
Of course, nobody is obligated to agree with a director when they tell the world one of their movies deserves to be appreciated, but the fact he made a point of singling it out underlines just how caught off-guard Hitchcock was by The Trouble with Harry failing to make a splash on a level similar to his most famous films.
