The Wrong Man

Perhaps the bleakest and saddest film the master of suspense ever made, completely devoid of his signature notes of humor, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man is a dark, dramatic film with a simple premise: a case of mistaken identity ruins a man’s life. Based on a true story, the film stars Henry Fonda (and his sensitive eyes) as professional bass player Manny Balestrero who, needing money to pay for his wife Rose’s (Vera Miles) dental procedure, endeavors to take a loan on her life insurance policy. At the insurance office, he’s mistaken for a hold-up man who’s been hitting the neighborhood, and subsequently arrested. While the film follows the detailed police and legal defense procedures (Anthony Quayle plays Manny’s attorney), it’s the psychological and emotional unwinding of the anxious couple that propels and energizes the film. Hitchcock presents Manny’s processing by the state as cold and clinical, extreme close-ups of Fonda’s soft-spoken, disbelieving face often eclipsing his surroundings as if he’s alone, his fellow inmates merely disembodied voices, while Rose’s state of mind degenerates suddenly and chemically (the first clue is her laughing wildly when they learn that both of Manny’s potential alibis are dead), her mind suddenly assailed by both apathy and paranoia (“We’ll lock them out and keep them out”), her re-location to a psychiatric hospital adding an unexpected layer of despair onto the proceedings. All the while, Bernard Herrmann’s score is unlike any he’d composed for Hitchcock, offering soft, plaintive jazz as if Manny’s nightclub band is calling him home. Robert Burks, Hitchcock’s devoted cinematographer through the 1950’s, arranges bars of light and shadows that extend the jail cell into other dimensions while disorienting viewers on occasion through special camera effects to represent the mind’s agitation. The Wrong Man may also be the Catholic Hitchcock’s most overtly religious film (possibly even including 1953’s I Confess), Manny’s rosary at hand in the courtroom, his mother-in-law’s entreaty for him to pray, even an image of Christ’s face dissolving into the face of the man whose arrival will be Manny’s salvation.