The Trouble with Harry Isn't Over (2001) - transcript

Transcript for the documentary The Trouble with Harry Isn't Over, based on the DVD subtitle track.

The following people appear in the transcript:

• Herbert Coleman - associate producer The Trouble with Harry
• John Forsythe
• John Michael Hayes - screenwriter The Trouble with Harry
• Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)
• Patricia Hitchcock
• Steven C Smith - biographer of Bernard Herrmann

Transcript

Patricia Hitchcock

"The Trouble with Harry" was based on a story by Jack Trevor Story, who had been in another movie of my father's called "Champagne".

My mother and father went back to Vermont to shoot all the exteriors, and I think of it a lot because my mother sent me this wonderful cookbook, which I used and used and used, from Vermont. I loved it.

One of the best parts of the movie, I think, was when Mildred Natwick finds the body and goes up to it. Instead of screaming like they think anybody would do, she just sort of nudges it, you know, with her foot and says: "What seems to be the trouble, Captain?"

Herbert Coleman

At the time that I accepted the offer from Hitch, I was second unit director on "To Catch a Thief" in the south of France. And when we got back to the studio and were working in the studio, he gave me a book to read called "The Trouble with Harry".

John Michael Hayes

It was an English book, as I recall, and he had picked it up either on a trip, or somebody sent it to him, but he kept it and always wanted to do it.

Herbert Coleman

So I read the book, and I thought it was a very funny thing, and I thought we should do it, and so we made a deal that I would producer the picture, but my title on the screen would be associate producer.

John Michael Hayes

He wanted to make "The Trouble with Harry", and Paramount was not all that delighted with his decision. But it was something he wanted to do, and he had been very good to Paramount, so they said, all right, they'd let him do it, knowing that it wasn't going to be a typical Hitchcock picture or even a major picture.

John Forsythe

I think it was an effort for him to break away from the whole what people expected Hitchcock to be. And for him to come out with a comedy based on digging up a body and pulling it out and...

John Michael Hayes

It was a story about a corpse. The trouble with Harry was that he was dead, and they couldn't get rid of him. That's what they called dark humor, black comedy, but it was not offensive.

John Forsythe

It was a nice piece of work. It was very clean and very funny and unlike the usual things that Hitchcock is associated with -- for example, there were no great sexy scenes. Shirley MacLaine and I had a thing about getting married and getting a double bed. Other than that, there was nothing really sexy about the movie, unlike a lot of Hitchcock's movies which were very, very sexy.

John Michael Hayes

Hitch was an enigma personally as well as professionally. He never once congratulated me or thanked me for anything I did well. I think he had the philosophy that, if you do well, that's what's expected of you -- that's what he pays you for. If you don't do well, then he criticizes you.

John Forsythe

Hitchcock worked very closely with the writers on this, because this was a trick for him.

For him to get involved with a comedy of this kind, the kooky kind of English comedy, was something rare.

John Michael Hayes

Now, he neither complimented me nor criticized me. He just was neutral. Early in my relationship with him, I didn't know whether he liked things or not when I sent them to him, and his wife came up to me one time and said, "Don't ever breathe a word of this to Hitch, but he's immensely pleased with you." He didn't want to tell me.

His wife, Alma, was pure sunshine. She was brilliant to begin with. She advised him on scripts. She advised him what to read. She looked at the first cuts of the films and made suggestions. She kept his balance and the balance of everyone with good humor, thoughtfulness and just sheer niceness. I'm very fond of Alma. Always have been.

Herbert Coleman

We went back to New York to complete the casting on the picture because nobody had been able to find anyone for the part of Jennifer. When I got to New York, my daughter had been telling me about a play in New York called "The Pajama Game" and kept insisting that I go and see it. And Shirley MacLaine was the understudy for Carol Haney the afternoon that we went to see it, but I thought it was Carol Haney. When the show was over, I said to Doc Erickson, the production manager, "Carol Haney is ideal for Jennifer, " and Doc said, "But that wasn't Carol Haney. It was a girl called Shirley MacLaine."

And I'd made arrangements for the Paramount office to pick her up and bring her to the St. Regis Hotel to meet Hitch and I on a certain morning, and that day we were in Hitch's suite working on the screenplay. The doorbell rang, and I opened the door, and there stood the most bedraggled figure I'd ever seen. It was Shirley MacLaine. She had no hat on her head, and rain was pouring off of her hair, down her face. She had a trench coat on, and the collar was covered with makeup. And it was open in front, and she had a brown, worn sweater and a skirt, also worn. I looked down on her feet, and she had on sandals with no socks, and she was really a bedraggled figure.

I said, "For goodness sakes, come in here." I said, "What happened to you? How'd you get so wet?" She said, "Well, I had to walk from the bus." I said, "But didn't the car pick you up?" She says, "No."

So I called to Alma. I said, "Alma, come and take this girl in there and give her something she could wear." So Alma came and took her to her bedroom and took those wet clothes off and gave her a robe to wear and called the people to come up and take her clothes down and dry them out for her, and that's the way we had the first interview for Shirley MacLaine.

John Forsythe

I, for one, was confused about how he had found me, and he said: [Imitating Hitchcock] "It was easy. I saw you on the stage." And I said, "Well, what did you think?" He said, "Well, I put you in my movie, didn't I?" And I said, "Thank you for that."

He saw me in "Teahouse of the August Moon", which was a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and he said "Meet me at Sardi's," which was the big luncheon place in New York where all the theater people went. So I went to Sardi's, and he said, "Oh," he said. "You're taller than you looked on the stage." "Yes, sir. "I said. "So are you." He laughed and he said, "That's a good answer! Yes."

Then we talked for a while, and he said, "There's one thing I can't stand, "he said. And I said, "What's that?" He said, "We have to watch out the way you're dressed." He said, "You dress like an Ivy Leaguer. "You dress like you went to school at Yale. "We must never have shoes with brown and white or black and whi--" And he looked down under the table and fortunately I didn't have two-tone shoes. Ivy League shoes! Because I think he would not have hired me if he had seen the two-tone shoes that sometimes I wore. But he was a glorious guy, and I enjoyed him immensely.

John Michael Hayes

Alfred Hitchcock thought we could do "The Trouble with Harry", which was based in England, in New England. We went to Vermont.

Patricia Hitchcock

One of the reasons he wanted to shoot it in Vermont was to bring a little lightness into it by using the colors. Because it was a pretty grim story. Except it was and it wasn't. Because the humor of it was so great that, you know, you really couldn't take it seriously.

Herbert Coleman

We settle on some place where we could find the beautiful fall colors. I finally found a place that was ideal to build a little store where John Forsythe would show his paintings. There was only about three houses in this whole little town, and it was ideal... just ideal for our picture. There was no place, though, that we could have for cover sets in that area, but I found a gymnasium by a school about 30 miles away and made arrangements for the interiors to be built there.

John Forsythe

What he tried to do is he tried to trick not only the audience but trick the camera crew and everybody. All of a sudden, he would wander into a scene. He did about three or four different ways in an effort to find one that was amusing.

Herbert Coleman

We were living at a place called "A Lodge at Smugglers' Notch". One evening, all of a sudden it started snowing, and when we pulled up at the lodge at Smugglers' Notch and got out, Hitch turned to me and said, "Tell me, who chose these locations?" And, of course, he knew I had.

John Forsythe

Unfortunately, I remember that the leaves had turned and there was no sun. There were about four or five cloudy days in a row, and we couldn't shoot. So what we did was we sat around and watched, and Hitchcock would sit in his chair and look at the sky. Keep looking at the sky. Pretty soon he would say, "Come here, John. Sit down. "We'll talk. It's very dull. It's boring. Sit down." So I would sit and I'd talk to him, make jokes with him, and we would pass the time of day.

John Michael Hayes

When we made "Trouble with Harry", it was a totally different experience from making "Rear Window". We had, with "Rear Window", an inside, controlled set. It was very manageable. It never got away from us. In "The Trouble with Harry", we arrived in Vermont -- at Stowe, Vermont -- took some plates of the fall foliage, which was unbelievably pretty, and then a storm hit us, and it stripped all the trees, and we had no leaves.

John Forsythe

So what we had to do, we had to pack up the whole show and move it to Paramount, to the studios in Hollywood. What they did was they built very big coffin-like things, and they threw the leaves into them, and when we went to Paramount Studios in Hollywood, they shipped these coffin-like containers out. And what they would do, they would take the leaves out of the containers and pin them onto the trees and then spray them different colors. That was Hitchcock's idea. [As Hitchcock] "Let's move on. Let's spray the damn leaves. Move on."

John Michael Hayes

We brought the leaves back from Vermont, pasted them on the trees and built a false hillside so that, principally, the scene where Harry is found dead and subsequently buried was all done on a set in California.

So we did half of it, let's say, in Los Angeles, and half in Vermont, and we all would have preferred Vermont full-time, because it was more lush. And we had a lot of outtakes, and later on, when I did a picture called "Peyton Place", they were looking for fall pictures. They wouldn't let us shoot Peyton Place in Vermont. We shot it in Maine, but they borrowed the fall shots from "The Trouble with Harry" at 20th Century-Fox and put it in. Vermont, which wouldn't let us film there, later in Vermont Magazine boasted that they couldn't make Peyton Place without Vermont!

Herbert Coleman

The weather was very bad there. It rained most of the time. Hitch had to work mostly in a gymnasium about 30 miles away that had a tin roof on it. We covered it with burlap and canvas and things, but still, I knew we were going to have to rerecord most of the dialogue in there. Of course, Hitch was not too happy about it, but he didn't complain too much.

John Forsythe

It was that old line somebody once said that "He treated actors like cattle." And he said, "That's not true. I treated them gloriously." He said, "Better than they deserve." He was an absolutely wonderful man. He had a wonderful sense of humor.

The first time on "The Trouble with Harry", he said, "Come and see the dailies. You'll like them." And I said, "Well, I don't think so." He said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, I'm a little nervous." "Oh, John, "he said, "don't be foolish. "It's only a movie, and, after all, we're all grossly overpaid." Wonderful, wonderful line!

Shirley turned out to be an exceptional actress. And Hitchcock said: "All my doing. I made her into an actress." And I'd say, "Yes. Of course you did. Sure. Sure." And he'd say, "Yes, I did," looking down at me on the stool that I was forced to sit on all the time. But it's untrue that he didn't like actors.

He had a fixation about death. He thought it was very amusing sometimes. It's the juxtaposition of things. You know, death is such a solemn... generally such a solemn thing. But in the hands of some people, it's very amusing.

That's why, in the choosing of Shirley MacLaine, it was a marvelous thing. She's that kind of girl. She's so kooky and strange and funny, or was at that point. She's now graduated into other things. But she kept the humor up. I tried very hard to keep it up.

Hitchcock himself would insert things. He'd shoot a scene and say, "That's very good, but let's try it this way." And he would throw everything out, and we'd try it another way. You have to have good actors to do that, and Edmund Gwenn was a marvelous actor. And Mildred Natwick and Shirley. Even Royal Dano. It was a very small cast but a select one.

Herbert Coleman

Hitch insisted on having a real body to play the part of the dead body, and he chose an actor by the name of Philip Truex. When Philip Truex was ordered to come up to the location, he and my wife Mary Belle were on the same plane, and they were seated together, and there he discovered that Mary Belle was my wife, and Mary Belle discovered that he was going to play the part of the dead body. He played the part of the dead body very well, by the way.

Patricia Hitchcock

One of the main things about it was the score, which was so beautiful, and it was the first time my father had worked with Bernard Herrmann. I think that added tremendously to the picture, and I think that's why he needed somebody as good as Herrmann to do this.

Herbert Coleman

There was a very funny scene in the picture where the captain was walking home, and he had his shotgun with him and he saw the deputy sheriff on the street. And he had to hide this shotgun, and he kind of hobbled past this deputy sheriff. Bennie Herrmann wrote the funniest little comedy music for the sea captain to walk in tempo to. It really helped the scene.

Steven C. Smith

There are a couple of different accounts as to how Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock began working together. One that was told to me was from the composer Lyn Murray, who had scored the Hitchcock film "To Catch a Thief". For some reason Lyn Murray was not able to do "The Trouble with Harry", and Murray told me that he recommended his friend, Bernard Herrmann. And that's probably a credible story, although I think that Hitchcock and Herrmann certainly knew of each other's work at that time.

The score turned out to be a tremendously happy collaboration between the two. In fact, Hitchcock later said that it was his favorite of all of the scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for him -- even more than "Psycho" or "North by Northwest". He thought that Herrmann had done a superb job at capturing the macabre humor in the subject. I think that's one reason why he wanted to be very careful about the composer. I think he realized how important the music was going to be in helping carry the very delicate tone of this unusual film.

The main title of "The Trouble with Harry" contains several musical fragments that we'll hear throughout the score. And, in fact, I have to tell you, it's music that Bernard Herrmann did not originally write for this film. Some of it was new to the film, but much of it was taken from a radio series he had recently created called "Crime Classics" for CBS. When he saw "The Trouble with Harry", Bernard Herrmann immediately thought back to much of the music he had written for "Crime Classics", and, indeed, got permission to reuse some of that music in the score.

The main title with "The Trouble with Harry" establishes, really, the tone of the movie, the tone of the score, and it even is something of a musical portrait of its director. In fact, Bernard Herrmann so identified this particular film score with Hitchcock, that he later arranged the various themes into a suite, a concert suite that he called "A Portrait of Hitch," and he dedicated it to Alfred Hitchcock.

Bernard Herrmann recorded the music for "The Trouble with Harry" at Paramount, and apparently this was the first time he had worked at Paramount. His friend, Lyn Murray, had worked there on many occasions, and he tried to prepare everyone for a good session and told the orchestra how much they'd like Bernard Herrmann. He told Herrmann that these are a bunch of great guys. "You'll have a great time working together."

Well, that's not what happened. Herrmann was temperamental, he was explosive, and he was particularly explosive if he felt that musicianship was not up to what he expected. And he had been spoiled by working at 20th Century-Fox for many years where the musicianship was really the best of anywhere in Hollywood. He came to Paramount and immediately started berating the orchestra. He was, evidently, very hard on the oboist who had a lot of important solos in the score. And pretty soon everybody despised him. He had a miserable time with them, and the work got done, but it was not a happy experience.

"The Trouble with Harry" marked the beginning of the most important creative association in his career, that with Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann knew exactly what Hitchcock was trying to achieve, not just on a basic plot level. He didn't just decorate the film with his music the way I think some composers did, and I think that's why Hitchcock immediately realized that he had found the collaborator that he wanted to continue working with.

John Forsythe

I must say that the movie turned out better than I had hoped for. 'Cause at one point or another, I didn't think we were gonna be a very funny movie.

Patricia Hitchcock

Unfortunately, I don't think it was a successful movie because people went in to see that thinking they were going to see a Hitchcock movie. Suspense, etc, etc. And it wasn't. It was a comedy, even though it was a dark comedy.

John Michael Hayes

Hitch was well aware, after making "The Trouble with Harry", that he didn't give the audience exactly what they expected. Yet, he liked that subtle sense of humor, and he was bound to do it.

John Forsythe

Digging up a dead body and pulling it around, taking it different places, is not considered funny, except by the British and some of the Europeans. But in the United States, death is not considered funny.

John Michael Hayes

When it was issued first in this country, it didn't do well. It went to Europe. In some places it played a solid year in theaters -- in London and in Rome.

John Forsythe

In France, it ran for about a year and a half on the Champs-Elysées. It was a big, big hit.

John Michael Hayes

And when they brought it back here, it paid off.

Patricia Hitchcock

"Trouble with Harry" had a great influence on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", because he was able to join the humor and a pretty grim story.

Alfred Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents footage)

Tonight's legend tells of modern life and how to solve a problem wife.

Patricia Hitchcock

Even if the stories were very macabre, he realized that the humor of it at the end was really necessary. You know, I think to bring a little lightness into it.

Alfred Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents footage)

For failing to call a doctor when his friend was bitten, Harry spent some little time in prison. Apparently the snake couldn't keep his mouth shut.

Patricia Hitchcock

And then it was fun for him to make fun of it, too, at the end... in his beginnings and the endings.

Alfred Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents footage)

No bullet, shriek or livid gash. No stains, no fumes, no ugly splatter. We use only the purest subject matter. Good night.

Herbert Coleman

Well, I enjoyed the movie very much. I thought it was a very funny movie, and it accomplishes exactly what Hitch was after to get. It wasn't successful at first and mainly because the New York office talked Hitch out of having the big publicity and all the tours for the picture. And so it took an awful long time to make its money back. Eventually it became a minor success.

John Michael Hayes

When I first saw Hitchcock, I thought I was in the presence of genius. After I worked with him for a while, I thought he was a good moviemaker. As I neared the end of my relationship with him, I was back to the genius again. Because there were more subtleties about him that took me a while to grasp.

John Forsythe

He was one of the outstanding elements in the motion picture industry, and he was a great, great director -- a man who was able to move in any direction: in comedy, in the kind of illuminating, wonderful mystery, and also the romantic too.

John Michael Hayes

He was a genius. There's no question. A filmmaking genius. He wasn't always right and he wasn't always successful. And he said, "Don't worry about it. We'll make another picture."