[Both To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry] drag along from scene to scene without much inner motivation.

Of the two films, To Catch a Thief is much more successful because of its superior cast and brighter sense of fun…. The Trouble With Harry is the more ambitious film of the two, and consequently, the nobler failure. It doesn't come off because even the little touches are done badly.

The chief interest of both productions is their conscious ridicule of chases and corpses, two of the staples of melodrama. Hitchcock has always had a sense of comic counterpoint in his melodramas, but, never before, has he attempted to invert his melodramas into parodies of themselves. It is in this inversion, this gateway to high comedy, that Hitchcock reveals his major flaws.

Part of the trouble with Hitchcock is that he has seldom demonstrated a sense of...