Abstract
In the unusual opening credits for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), the camera tracks from left to right over primitive, cartoon-like drawings depicting an autumn pastoral: birds and trees of ill-proportioned shapes and sizes, rendered primarily in hues of reds, oranges, and blues, a New England house with a porch and rocking chair, a shining sun, more birds, now looking to the right of the frame, before concluding with the incongruous image of a horizontal corpse, face up with a blank expression, eyes closed, in pointy, oversized shoes. This is set to Bernard Herrmann’s idiosyncratic score, by turns playful, whimsical, and sinister. For the credits, Hitchcock hired renowned New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg, whose affectedly childlike (i.e., faux naif) perspective and dry humor in these (uncredited) drawings, a la Hitchcock’s favorite painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) who aligned his work with romanticism,1 immediately establish the film’s off-key, childlike point of view. As Ed Sikov argues: “Steinberg’s cartoon vision of nature in the credits sequence is both juvenile and grotesque, as if drawn by a disturbed child. It exudes an element of corruption that distorts what might otherwise be a kindergartener’s view of a landscape.”2 This segues into the film proper, where an actual, flesh-and-blood child wanders through the almost dream-like New England countryside during the fall: gun-toting, intrepid preschooler Arnie Rogers (played by Jerry Mathers, later of TV sitcom’s Leave it to Beaver).
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© 2014 Debbie Olson
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Schober, A. (2014). Renegotiating Romanticism and the All-American Boy Child: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). In: Olson, D. (eds) Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_8
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