The Wrong Man (1956)

The Wrong Man is one of the lesser-known works of my favorite film director, Alfred Hitchcock. Based on a true story, it stars Henry Fonda as Manny Balestrero, a musician who is wrongfully accused of a series of armed robberies. Over the course of the film, he is ground through the wheels of th justice system; he is interrogated, arrested, booked, processed and finally goes to trial. Vera Miles, whom some no doubt recognize from Hitchcock's better-known masterpiece Psycho, plays his wife Rose, who becomes equally, if not more strained by the events.

The film is about an innocent man being suspected of a crime he did not commit, which is something of a staple in Hitchcock movies. But while most of those films focus on the hero's search for the real criminals and a chance to clear his own name, The Wrong Man places our viewpoint elsewhere. It is more about what someone in that situation feels rather than how they try to resolve it. As Balestrero is moved from the safety and freedom of his home to the precinct, to his holding cell, to another proceeding and finally to a cell at a prison building, the justice system becomes very alien to him. Almost nobody speaks a word to him, though many speak of and for him. He is passed from officer to officer, all of whom handle him in a cold, detached manner. The result becomes a conflict-filled story with an antagonist without a face or name that really is just trying to do its job.

As in so many of his other films, Hitchcock uses point-of-view to place us in Balestrero's situation. During the trial, for example, the proceedings are all filmed from the defendant chair in which he is sitting. In another scene, we see how he enters the holding cell and spends his first night in confinement, the camera slowly and almost sadistically trailing the outlines of the tiny room, from floor to ceiling and then return to the locked door to really hammer in how left to his fate Balestrero is. This direction puts us in the same cell as him, in the same situation, and makes us more acutely aware of the claustrophoia of his predicament.

Verdict: 4,5:5

A tense, claustrophobic film about an innocent man trapped in an inescapable situation.