Wow! What a brilliant film!!
Apparently it was one of Hitchcock’s own personal favourites. It’s certainly one of my favourites by him, and we have almost all of his films. Beautifully shot (sorry, can’t resist the pun) in Vermont, with a superb cast, and a really bizarre and unusual approach – black comedy is the obvious phrase, but doesn’t really do the film justice – to Hitchcock’s favourite central theme, untimely death.
Although it’s completely different to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, that’s the film I think of as I watch this. Not for any overt similarities, but because it’s a rather singular and beautiful work of cinematic art. Blimp is often funny, but overall it’s profound and moving. This seems at first a purely ridiculous soufflé, almost the opposite of Blimp. But, like so much of Woody Allen’s oeuvre, there’s an enormous depth and warmth hiding in the many layers that are there, if you can not so much see as feel them.
There are so many great things in this apparently light or trivial or even ‘silly’ yarn about what to do with Harry’s corpse (is that the trouble with Harry?), such as the fact that two of the leads – Capt Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwen) and Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) – are not your ordinary leading couple material. And even the more apparently normal male and female leads are delightfully subverted, in the persons of artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) and Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), the latter Harry’s wife.
And then there’s Vermont in the Fall, filmed in mid-fifties Technicolour. A magnificently magical setting that evokes a pure Arcadia on the one hand, and a buttoned-down small-town Puritanism on the other. Exactly the right place for this diabolically funny meditation on humanity, morals, sex, art and death.
In a word, brilliant. Essential viewing for the true lover of great cinema.