ipl-logo

The Trouble With Harry Rhetorical Analysis

474 Words2 Pages

The film opens on a small boy, Arnie (Jerry Mathers), playing in the Vermont hillside on a splendid autumn day. He comes on the dead body of a man happens to be one of Harry Worp (Philip Treux). The entire story revolves around the dead body which is buried, then taken out and reburied, till it becomes convinced that Harry died a natural death. Parisian audiences and critics appreciated the first release there, but British and American viewers reacted coldly to this visually beautiful but static and finally unsettling little movie. Hitchcock himself says “The Trouble with Harry is an approach to a strictly British genre, the humour of the macabre. I made that picture to prove that the American public could appreciate British humour”(qtd …show more content…

There are worse things in life than death and the real maturity lies in accepting the fact rather than whimpering about it. Death is natural, man is mortal and we all have to go sometime or the other. Everything in nature has to decay just like the autumn in the forest. The film conveys that sex and death should be taken as realities and should not be considered with gravity. The film thus overturns the popular understanding of the Puritan ethos by suggesting that sex and death should not be viewed with fear. One of the best lines in Trouble with Harry (1955) is when old Edmund Gwenn, a retired sea captain is dragging the body along for the first time and a woman comes up to him on the hill and says, “What seems to be the trouble Captain?” (qtd from the film). Hitchcock regarded it terribly funny and the spirit of the whole story. Hitchcock always interested in establishing a contrast, went against the traditional and broke away from clichés. Hitchcock always tried to elevate the common place in life to a higher level. With Trouble with Harry, Hitchcock took melodrama out of the pitch-black night and brought it out in the sunshine. It is as if Hitchcock had set up a murder alongside a rustling brook and spilled a drop of blood

Open Document