Is it just me or are the folks who worry about humanity turning the planet into a giant landfill with all of our diapers, plastic bags, water bottles, and paint thinner really missing the mark? What they should be worrying about is the looming disaster when our atmosphere degrades into an unbreathable soup, stifled with transmissions of true crime TV, our primetime hours cluttered with "ripped from the headlines" Law & Order episodes and mind-numbingly repetitive docudramas like 48 Hours Mystery.

The fascination for true crime is like the morbid need to rubberneck when we see blood on the street. It's the "that could be me" spoken deeply within us. This is the anxiety Alfred Hitchcock hoped to tap when he, for the only time ever in a film, forewent his traditional cameo, stepped before the camera in his own persona and spoke, introducing The Wrong Man as "A real-life story more terrifying than any fiction."

There is, of course, a twist: This is not a real-life true crime story. It's a true non-crime story.


Alfred Hitchcock's
THE WRONG MAN (1956)

Manny Balestrero plays bass at Club Stork in New York. He lives his life with the same even precision with which he plays his music. He doesn't drink, doesn't gamble, and late at night when the club closes he simply goes home to his wife and sons, all of whom adore him. But playing for the club doesn't make a man rich, and Manny needs to take out a loan on his wife's life insurance to pay for her dental work. His metronomic life is interrupted when the women at the insurance office mistakenly finger him for the man who recently held them up. Manny soon finds himself adrift in the bizarre and darkly absurd currents of the justice system.

The Wrong Man is only 105 minutes, but it noticeably takes its time. Like the plucked bass that heightens tension in what is one of the most simple and effective of film scores, everything that's good about this movie is quietly methodical. Don't expect the excitement you may associate with cops and lawyers. Instead, and much more realistically, expect to experience Manny's inability to understand as the police demand he jump through endless hoops and the courtroom devolves into inanity.

Henry Fonda plays Manny with a Jimmy Stewart-like decency. This is a quality some smirk at, but few actors can really communicate it, can put the audience on their side through sheer force of wholesomeness. It's an essential quality for this film, where we must rally to the protagonist not because of what he does, but because of what he hasn't done.

At the same time Fonda must communicate Manny's progression through incredulity, confusion, frustration, and anger. This is done in minute increments, as the mellow musician remains patient through the bewildering demands of the police and polite in his repeated requests to phone his wife. The controlled precision and even temperament with which Manny lives his life makes more remarkable his rare outbursts, his silently clenched fists, and his escape-hungry eyes. In a quiet place a soft voice can sound loud as a shout.

Manny's wife, Rose, is played by Vera Miles, a Hitchcock favorite. She does well as a loving, concerned wife, and later delivers a wonderfully subdued portrayal of mental illness, but is underwhelming in her key transitional scene. She is helped by some excellent make-up and camera work, which transform her from lovely to puffy-faced and dysphoric in much the same way that Fonda's unshaven face communicates his experience of jail.

Hitchcock displays uncharacteristic forbearance (with the exception of the spinning camera in the jail scene) and delivers a powerfully empathetic story. There is some feeling of loose ends or lost opportunities, an example being the attention paid to the writing and rewriting of the demand note and the detectives' careless shuffling of the notes, all of which successfully adds tension but also establishes an attachment of importance to the notes, leaving the audience with an unfulfilled expectation.

The Wrong Man is additionally interesting today, with its portrayal of both the less refined practices of police detectives and the nebulous conception of mental illness, circa 1950. But its great merit remains its care and patience in soliciting empathy for its falsely accused protagonist. It's one of Hitchcock's better films, too often overshadowed by the sensationalism of his more popular offerings.


– Panguitch


For some short Hitchcock try Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Volume 1: http://www.epinions.com/content_97352781444

For a Hitchcockian comedy try Mr. and Mrs. Smith: http://www.epinions.com/content_197202644612

To see Hitchcock attempt an international spy thriller, try Topaz: http://www.epinions.com/content_244675481220

But to see Hitchcock in top form, try Rope: http://www.epinions.com/content_79681719940


Recommended: Yes