With lovers meeting and stumbling across strange secrets in the woods, The Trouble with Harry resembles A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in its highly mannered comedic take on death and violence in out-of-the-way America, it has the look of an ancestor of the Coen brothers’ Fargo. It is, though, Hitchcock’s sense of humor undiluted—albeit one that must also have been very close to that of John Michael Hayes and Jack Trevor Story—and includes what Hitchcock claimed was his favorite line in any of his films, when the bashful Miss Gravely sees Captain Wiles standing over the corpse and asks, “What seems to be the trouble, Captain?” The English silliness and dark understatements were less appreciated by American critics and audiences—The New Yorker harrumphed about the declining quality of Hitchcock by alleging the film “skids to preposterous depths”—though it fared far better in the United Kingdom and in France. Hitchcock felt a little stung that in making a film that so thoroughly pleased himself, he had failed to entertain an audience.
Someone else who had misgivings about The Trouble with Harry was Thelma Ritter, who had recently performed so brilliantly in the role of Stella in Rear Window. Admiring her comedic talents, Hitchcock asked Ritter to take the part of Miss Gravely (ultimately given to Mildred Natwick), but in a letter to her husband, she sounded appalled at the prospect: “I must not have much vision but this one scares me. It’s lewd, immoral, and for anyone without a real nasty off beat sense of humor, in very bad taste.” The writer Peter Conrad once dubbed Hitchcock “everyone’s wicked uncle,” a homely looking man, ever ready with a barbed gag, intended to “prod at the bad conscience of the twentieth century.” Hitchcock’s sense of humor produced unease, even among many of those who liked and admired him. As already noted, Oriana Fallaci, an avowed fan, labeled him “the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met.” Descriptions like that, whether in jest or in earnest, have been attached to Hitchcock for decades, at least since he cuffed Madeleine Carroll and had her dragged around the set of The 39 Steps. Her costar Robert Donat looked back on the incident with admiration for her stoicism but winced at the “weals and bruises which the handcuffs made on her delicate wrists” and the “humiliations” she endured. John Gielgud, who played alongside Carroll in Secret Agent, also thought Hitchcock was “beastly to her.” Cruelty was something Hitchcock took very seriously—perhaps that’s why he made it the subject of so many jokes.
Hitchcock holding court at the Screen Directors Guild award dinner, February 1955.
Charles Bennett was in no doubt that Hitchcock’s propulsive creative energy was sadism. When Hitchcock screened Psycho for him, Bennett concluded that “only a sadist could have directed that bathroom scene.” Hitchcock was used to that kind of criticism. “I directed that scene for laughs,” he told Bennett, and said the same to lots of others, implying that those who didn’t like Psycho were suffering from a serious sense of humor deficiency.
If, by this, Hitchcock meant that he intended to fill auditoriums with laughter as Marion Crane’s blood swirls down the shower drain, he was obviously being dishonest. If, however, he meant that he found amusement in the suffering of others—if only the suffering of the audience who he knew would leap out of their seats in fright—then he was speaking the truth, and confirming that, as Bennett charged, sadism—or at least an insistent urge to assert his control over others—was a powerful force within him.
Hitchcock found great sport in seeing others being humbled. It was there in his publicly expressed desire to “knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls.” In his films, characters are frequently shoved off their perch and lose their dignity, and in real life he seized any opportunity to pierce what he considered pretension or conceitedness. Most examples of this occurred before the move to Hollywood. When, as a young director in London, he overheard a colleague talking at length about his new, modern home, Hitchcock decided to have two tons of coal delivered to the man’s front door, just desserts, Hitchcock thought, for his boasting. Shortly after Joan Harrison started working as Hitchcock’s secretary in the early 1930s, she told the boss that she couldn’t work late one night as she had a party to attend. The following day she was inundated with telegrams inviting her to social engagements. Hitchcock had sent them all.
Disapproval of, and ceaseless jokes about, those who get above their station is surely a
