There's no Trouble With Harry: Hitchcock's lost masterpiece

Writer Brasdshaw gets no argument from me, though Trouble has never been lost with me.  Trouble stands out for me as the other comedy classic from the 50's. Prediction:  In less than a decade, we will see Trouble second only Some Like it Hot on greatest comedy lists.

The Trouble With Harry: Hitchcock's lost masterpiece | Film | The Guardian:







From the article:

On October 12 1954, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting on location in Morrisville, Vermont, when the overhead bracket supporting a VistaVision camera snapped. Weighing 850lb – the same as a car – the camera unit dropped through the air, swiped the director's shoulder and rolled over, pinning a crew member briefly to the ground. It was the nearest the master himself came to violent death: just a few inches to the side and it would have smashed that unmistakable domed head like a peach and provided cinema theorists with any number of irresistible, macabre metaphors. Hitchcock calmly ordered filming to continue with a replacement camera. Later he packed up, however, declaring himself unsatisfied with the weather in Vermont, and moved the shoot back into the studio in Los Angeles.

The film was The Trouble With Harry. Perhaps the near-miss was a bad omen, because Hitchcock's most experimental, subversive and uncompromisingly strange black comedy – about people in a small town who can't decide what to do with a dead body – was a catastrophic commercial failure. It lost half a million dollars at the box office and was unavailable for decades after release. The colossal Hitchcock retrospective just getting under way at London's BFI Southbank has already elicited many elegant articles, endlessly rehearsing the accepted canon: Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, The Birds … and so on – but The Trouble With Harry doesn't make the cut
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