Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite comedy movie: “One of the funniest films I have ever seen”
Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t known for comedy, but by the time he moved from England to Hollywood and started filming in colour rather than black-and-white, many of his films became surreptitiously comedic. Think of all the witty banter between love interests in Rear Window, North by Northwest, and To Catch a Thief, or the arch trailers he performed in with utmost camp and relish. Under all that nail-biting suspense, Hitch clearly had a sense of humour.
He even made a murder mystery that was more of a cosy comedy whodunnit than a crime thriller with 1955’s The Trouble with Harry. The title gives the tone away as soon as you realise in one of the opening scenes that the trouble with Harry is that he’s dead. Throughout his career, especially in its final two decades, the ‘Master of Suspense’ erred toward capers rather than brooding mysteries.
It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that he was a huge fan of classic comedy. In a 1969 interview with Bryan Forbes, the same year that Topaz was released, Hitchcock was asked about what made him laugh. “I think one of the funniest films I have ever seen is Laurel and Hardy in a film called Bonnie Scotland,” he said. “The longest take I have ever seen on the screen comes when the two of them are standing on a Scottish bridge, and Laurel is taking snuff.” His character sneezes into the snuff box, launching all the powder into Hardy’s face. The resulting sneeze is so enormous that it catapults Hardy off the bridge and into the water, where he somehow continues to sneeze, rocketing a geyser of water back up to where Laurel is standing.
It is a classic bit of physical comedy from one of the most revered comedic duos in history. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy got their start in silent movies, which accounts for why they maintained a physical approach to comedy even after transitioning to talkies. Like Hitchcock himself, they influenced film so profoundly that it’s difficult to impress upon later generations just how revolutionary their work was. You might watch one of their films and think it’s old-fashioned and broad without realising that it was creating the template that comedians have been working from ever since.
The range of people they have influenced is perhaps the best barometer for their impact. Samuel Beckett, Steve Martin, Lucille Ball, and Harold Pinter probably wouldn’t fit together in any other category, but their reverence for the comedic duo unites them.
Hitchcock never got to work with Laurel and Hardy, but he said in the interview that all of his films are comedies, at least in some form. He wouldn’t have been able to work with the comedic duo anyway, he explained, because he was already too much like Hardy. In a way, his many appearances in his movie trailers are physical comedy in the style of a Hardy role. For example, when he appears in the trailer for Frenzy floating in the River Thames, it is exactly the sort of deadpan gag that the comedian would have done.
