The Trouble with Harry vs Fargo

The Trouble with Harry

A corpse is an inconvenience for the neighbors, and nobody screams. No one is much upset about Harry's death. That calm tone makes the scenes funny and also a bit eerie.

Fargo

People discuss murder, kidnapping and getting rid of bodies in the same flat tone as restaurant orders and weather reports. Deadpan means saying outrageous things with a straight face, and the Coens' version has nothing cruel in it. It is how the film shows that evil is ordinary, dull and deeply stupid. Marge is competent and normal, and that threatens this kind of evil more than any dramatic showdown would.

The Trouble with Harry

Highwater is a tiny Vermont hamlet where everyone knows everyone and no one trusts the deputy, who earns his living per arrest. The neighbors close ranks against the law, and the body shows what the town values.

Fargo

Minnesota's social world is flat, polite and deeply local, and the film uses it as the measure of right and wrong. It is hospitable, direct and unpretentious, and Jerry's scheme goes against all of that. Marge is what those values look like when they are working at their best. The film says they are enough to beat any clever criminal.

The Trouble with Harry

The film is set among autumn leaves in Vermont. The crew arrived to find the trees nearly bare, so they glued leaves back on. The painter John Ferren made the paintings Sam sells, and Hitchcock liked how his vivid colors matched the foliage.

Fargo

Roger Deakins photographs the Minnesota winter as an unbroken field of white. Roads, fields and sky all merge into the same colorless stretch. People stand exposed against that blankness with nowhere to hide. They are cut off physically, and they are cut off morally too.