Plot
The quirky but down-to-earth residents of the small hamlet of Highwater, Vermont, are faced with the freshly dead body of Harry Worp (Phillip Truex), which has inconveniently appeared on the hillside above the town. The problem of what to do with the body and, more importantly, how and why Harry was killed is the "trouble with Harry".
Three of the main characters in the film each believe at some point that they are the one who actually killed Harry. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is sure that he killed the man with a stray shot from his rifle while hunting, until it is shown he actually shot a rabbit. Spunky and independent young Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), Harry's estranged wife who along with her small son Arnie (Jerry Mathers) ran away from the loveless marriage, believes that he died after she hit him with a milk bottle after he tracked her down. Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) feels that the man died after a blow from the heel of her hiking boot after he came at her out of the bushes (still reeling from the blow received at the hands of Jennifer). Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), an attractive and nonconformist artist, is open-minded about the whole event and is prepared to help his friends and neighbors in any way he can. In any case, nobody is upset about this death.
However, none of the principal characters want the body to come to the attention of the "authorities" in the form of cold, humorless Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano), who earns his living per arrest. The main characters conceal the body by burying it and then have to dig it up again. This happens several times. The body is also concealed at one point by hiding it in a bathtub.
In the end it is established that Harry actually died of natural causes; no foul play was involved. In the meantime, Sam and Jennifer have fallen in love, as have the Captain and Miss Gravely. Sam has been able to sell his paintings to a passing millionaire. The artist refuses to accept money and instead requests a few simple gifts for his friends and himself.
Read more about this topic: The Trouble With Harry
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)