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The Wrong Man

An unusual opening: Hitchcock's silhouette appears. (He looks a little too thin. Was it a double?) And some decent, familiar yet unnerving sounds from Bernard Herrmann. As is so often the case with Hitchcock, it only takes a few seconds for viewers to be convinced that it is a film they absolutely have to see. But everything seems different.

Hitchcock is talking to us! The special thing about this film, he says, is that it is based on a true story. "I haven't prettified anything, nor have I added anything, and you will share my view that life often plays a stranger game with human destiny than a poet could invent.
"Nothing prettified? Nothing added? A film which attempts to show the factual and objective view? What kind of a Hitchcock film doesn't celebrate the greatest achievements of cinema: subjectivity, identification, suggestion?

Hitchcock without the courage of the inner view of his hero - and that, just a year before VERTIGO?

If his intention was really to set about making a kind of true crime documentary film, one must stress here, that he failed. Thankfully. In actual fact, THE WRONG MAN became one of the most subjective and personal of all Hitchcock's films - firstly because it so consistently depicts the director's quintessential primeval fear story, and secondly because he does this in complete harmony with the identity of his film hero.

The hard, clear, richly contrasting black and white in THE WRONG MAN seems harsh and documentary-like, as does the complete absence of any sensational dramaturgy. Hitchcock tells the events with ice-cold consistency - and works us into a rare emotional state.

Even today, THE WRONG MAN is an exceptionally claustrophobic, nightmarish and depressing film; a cold vision of the deconstruction of a human being at the hands of police bureaucracy.

Christopher Emmanuel Balestrereo, known as Manny (Henry Fonda) is a bass player in a dance band in a happening New York club. He doesn't earn much and lives a very modest, but happy life with his wife Rose (Vera Miles) and their two sons.

When Manny appears at an insurance company one day in order to raise money on his policy, a horrified member of staff - wrongly - identifies him as the man who robbed the branch a few weeks earlier. The woman's panic reaction is enough to convince her colleagues that the man is the culprit.

That same evening, Manny is seized by the police on his way home and temporarily arrested. At the following identification parades, he is repeatedly singled out as the culprit, making his protestations that they must have the wrong man, become more and more ridiculous.

The evidence machine starts to operate and the film takes its time with the attempt to break through it.

Hitchcock unwraps the picture of a systematic network, which doesn't seek, but wants a guilty party, and which inexorably closes in around Manny. In his growing desperation he asks the police officers who are interrogating him what he can do to prove his innocence. Their persistent answer is: "You just have to tell us the truth. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of."

Hitchcock demonstrates the scorn of this claim with brutal consistency. He painstakingly outlines every step with which the police draw their victim into the lair. It's an effective system of interwoven symbolic plots which are determinedly seeking to nail him rather than the truth. Manny's great mistake is his belief in the power of innocence, and its ability to bring the truth to light.

But according to Hitchcock, truth ranks second place in the values system of the criminal universe. Even a completely innocent person like Manny doesn't stand a chance against the imaginative power of those who wish to see him as a guilty party. What we are is rarely stronger than what others wish to make us. Whoever projects evil onto us, won't remove the image easily.

Throughout the whole thing, we are always utterly confident of Manny's innocence. Not for a second does Hitchcock play with the possibility of adding any insecurity or distance which could cast doubt on his hero. And it is precisely this doubt which is the strongest weapon of the police: guilty until proven innocent.
Hitchcock puts Henry Fonda to the task. With panic rising in him, Fonda tries to maintain his dignity and concentration. The offensive of innocent expressions - which are absolutely authentic - are his death knell, because in the eyes of the police, they make him even less believable. A shy, innocent wild animal looking down the barrel of a gun just before the trigger is pulled. Manny, a man of humiliated pride, who is fighting a desperate battle for the last shreds of his self-worth is suddenly confronted with a complete lack of control - and what is almost worse, with a deep sense of shame. Almost as a sideline, the film depicts the power that shame has on our self-confidence. Fonda and Hitchcock lend this shame a rarely detailed reality. The humiliated man always looks to the ground, nobody dares look Fonda in the eyes any more, and Hitchcock sticks with this perspective throughout. So for a long time, we don't see the man to whom Fonda is handcuffed. We only see his feet. But we understand that the bowing of Fonda's upright poise is the precursor to a broken backbone. For he who looks up, sees himself amongst those like himself. And Manny is among real criminals.

When he then enters a cell, the door closes from the side (like a hard wipe) right in front of our noses. We see the cell through a small window, and with the camera, we move through it to find Manny in the small, silent space. It's like an end point in the middle of the film. Like so often in this film, Fonda is very graphic, framed by the pattern of the jail bars. A moment of endless loneliness.

Then a voice comes from the background, from outside: "Balestrero?" It's as if Fonda is paralysed in his cell, as if he doesn't hear anything, because at first he doesn't react. It's as if his name has lost its meaning, as if his previous existence has already been wiped out. But then he wakes up out of his oblivion, turns to us …and we zoom out of the hole in the cell door and back to freedom. His bail has been paid.

What is impressive here, is the way that on the one hand, Hitchcock introduces the psychic dimensions of spatial limitations, and on the other hand, demonstrates the opportunity of cinema to connect inside and outside with one another.

The police force, on the other hand, is a gigantic apparatus with countless faces. Just when the viewer starts to get used to one of the interrogators, he is replaced with a different one who accompanies us to prison; a different one again takes us to the judge, and so on. It seems as if nobody is responsible, as if there is nobody to hold onto. So at some point you stumble, and fall.

At the beginning of the film, Fonda is a rock of a man. At some point he begins to sway a bit, and then when he ultimately falls, luckily he does so into the still outstretched arms of his wife.

That is one half of the film. The other half deals with the hand-wringing search for an alibi, proof of innocence, an anchor, whilst the hero's social sphere systematically falls to pieces.

Manny's wife, Rose, who is plagued with increasing feelings of guilt, is crushed under the increasing hopelessness of the situation. Old, suppressed fears come swimming to the surface, and prepare to break the fragile creature which was so well cared for in the stable, unwavering Manny. Her husband has to sit back and helplessly watch as she goes insane.

In order to make this horrible loss as intense as possible, Hitchcock risks scenes of rare intimacy and tenderness right at the start of the film. Early in the film, we observe a gentle night conversation between Manny and Rose, about the most simple, everyday things. It is in the context of clear, family values: love, security, children. Manny knows very well how to dismiss the nagging doubts which his wife sometimes has about the way they live their lives. Hitchcock presents such moments of the petit-bourgeois family as a nest of security without any touch of irony, with no double meaning or allusion. And that probably makes this the only Hitchcock film in which we experience a hero who first helps his wife to wash the dishes and then says things like "I can't live without her."

It makes the scenes in the latter part of the film, where the fragile happiness crumbles, even more hard to bear. In one of the strongest sequences, we see an over-challenged Manny as he is forced to give in to his wife's fear fantasies - a simple man against the overwhelming power of psychosis: he doesn't stand a chance. When Rose, in a state of advanced madness, even starts hitting her husband with a hairbrush, his mirror image shatters: in a short space of time, these regular people have become a tattered existence.

Robbed of the meaningful state of marriage, Manny turns to the last source of comfort: God. The silent prayer, which Hitchcock observes with devotion, is followed by redemption. In a brilliant fade shot, the head of the real culprit grows into Fonda's facial expression - and is arrested soon thereafter. Manny is acquitted of all charges.

Then comes the scene in which the two men, whose identities flowed into each other, meet. Fonda angrily approaches his double, and hisses: "Do you know what you have done to my wife?" Of course the man doesn't know, and he can't make it up.

It is too late for Rose. She remains in a state of insanity in her clinic and not even the good news can bring her back to her old self. Even here, Hitchcock remains astonishingly hard and realistic, although a silly closing title weakens the whole thing. But his outspoken will to stay as close to the real case as possible, leads him to some surprising consequences.

Vera Miles' lost face in the institute stays in our memories for a long time. She was rarely as good as in this film - even if the story of her psychological demise has been portrayed as a shortcoming in the film. Objection! Miles reveals the secret, slowly bubbling depressive structure in a convincing and continuous way - on watching the film several times over, it becomes apparent that it's already hinted at during very early scenes. Rose is an atypical Hitchcock heroine, a strange cross between the two very different types of women from his other films: both pragmatically smart and somnambulistically irrational. A fusion of Doris Day and Ingrid Bergman? Or better still, Barbara Bel Geddes and Kim Novak? After all, Hitchcock wanted to go on to make VERTIGO with Vera Miles, but her pregnancy prevented their working together. What kind of film would VERTIGO have been without Kim Novak? The question alone is somehow unnerving.

(Appeared in: ALFRED HITCHCOCK, published by Lars-Olav Beier and Georg Seeßlen, Bertz Publishers)