Tag Archives: Film

There’s a dead man on a Vermont hillside, and nobody in this movie can be bothered to call the police. That’s the joke. It shouldn’t work. It works.

Alfred Hitchcock spent two decades getting rich off making people afraid, and then in 1955, at the absolute height of it, he made a movie about a corpse nobody can work up the nerve to be scared of. Harry turns up dead on a hillside outside a New England town so pretty it looks painted, and the whole town’s reaction amounts to a shrug and a sigh. Captain Wiles is pretty sure his rifle did it. Miss Gravely thinks it might’ve been her hiking boot. The local painter is mostly annoyed Harry’s ruining the light. Nobody screams.