The Wrong Man is a 1956 American docudramafilm noir directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Henry Fonda and Vera Miles. The film was drawn from the true story of an innocent man charged with a crime, as described in the book The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero by Maxwell Anderson[2][3] and in the magazine article "A Case of Identity", which was published in Life magazine in June 1953 by Herbert Brean.[4]
It is recognized as the only Hitchcock film based on a true story and whose plot closely follows the real-life events.
The Wrong Man had a notable effect on two significant directors: it prompted Jean-Luc Godard's longest piece of written criticism in his years as a critic,[5][6] and it has been cited as an influence on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.[7]
Plot
Alfred Hitchcock (or a double; he is in silhouette) appears on screen to tell the audience that the film's "every word is true".
Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero, a down-on-his-luck musician at New York City's Stork Club, needs $300 for dental work for his wife Rose. When he visits the office of a life insurance company to borrow money against Rose's policy, he is mistaken by the staff for a man who had held them up twice.
He is questioned by the police, who call him "Chris" rather than Manny, and tell him that they are looking for a man who had robbed the insurance company and other businesses, and that he might be their man. Manny is instructed to walk in and out of a liquor store and a delicatessen that had also been robbed by the same man. He is asked to write the words from a stick-up note used by the robber in the insurance company robbery; he misspells the word "drawer" as "draw"—the same mistake made in the robber's note. After being picked out of a police lineup by an employee of the insurance company who had witnessed the robberies, he is arrested on charges of armed robbery.
Attorney Frank O'Connor sets out to prove that Manny cannot possibly be the right man. At the time of the first hold-up, he was on vacation with his family, and at the time of the second, his jaw was so swollen that witnesses would certainly have noticed. Of the three people with whom the couple played cards at the vacation hotel, two have died and the third cannot be found. This devastates Rose, whose resulting depression forces her to be hospitalized.
During Manny's trial, he prays with the rosary after his mother urges him to pray for strength. A juror's remark forces a mistrial. While awaiting a second trial, Manny is exonerated when the true robber is arrested holding up a grocery store. Manny visits Rose at the hospital to share the good news, but she remains severely depressed. Still, it is said that she recovers two years later.
Cast
Henry Fonda as Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero
A Hitchcock cameo is typical of most of his films. In The Wrong Man, he appears only in silhouette in a darkened studio before the credits at the beginning of the film, announcing that the story is true. Originally, he intended to be seen as a customer walking into the Stork Club, but he edited himself from the final print.[9]
Many scenes were filmed in Jackson Heights, the neighborhood where Manny lived when he was accused. Most of the prison scenes were filmed among the convicts in a New York City prison in Queens. The courthouse was located at the corner of Catalpa Avenue and 64th Street in Ridgewood.[10]
Bernard Herrmann composed the soundtrack, as he did for all of Hitchcock's films from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Marnie (1964). It is one of the most subdued scores Herrmann ever wrote, and one of the few that he composed with some jazz elements, primarily to represent Fonda's appearance as a musician in the nightclub scenes.[citation needed]
A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote that Hitchcock "has fashioned a somber case history that merely points a finger of accusation. His principals are sincere and they enact a series of events that actually are part of New York's annals of crime but they rarely stir the emotions or make a viewer's spine tingle. Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama."[11] Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times agreed, writing, "As drama, unhappily, it proves again that life can be more interminable than fiction."[12]
Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote, "Having succeeded often in making fiction seem like fact, Alfred Hitchcock in The Wrong Man now manages to make fact seem like fiction. But it is not good nor interesting fiction."[13]
John McCarten of The New Yorker declared, "Mr. Hitchcock makes a good point about the obtuseness of a police group that holds firm to the belief that everyone is guilty until proved innocent, but his story of the badgered musician is never very gripping."[14]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that the early police procedural scenes "make a powerful contribution to the effectiveness of the film's first part", but that Rose's hospitalization felt like a "dramatically gratuitous development, particularly as its demands are ill met by the actress concerned", and that the final act of the film suffered a "slow decline into a flatly factual ending".[15]
Variety called the film "a gripping piece of realism" that builds to a "powerful climax, the events providing director a field day in his art of characterization and suspense".[16]
Harrison's Reports was also positive, calling it "grim but absorbing melodramatic fare", with Henry Fonda and Vera Miles "highly effective" in their roles.[17]
Jean-Luc Godard, in his lengthy treatise on the film, wrote, "The only suspense in The Wrong Man is that of chance itself. The subject of this film lies less in the unexpectedness of events than in their probability. With each shot, each transition, each composition, Hitchcock does the only thing possible for the rather paradoxical but compelling reason that he could do anything he liked."[18]
The film holds an approval rating of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from 27 surveyed critics, with an average rating of 8.1/10.[20]
Glenn Kenny, writing for RogerEbert.com in 2016, stated that the film may be the "least fun" of Hitchcock's Hollywood period, but that it "is as fluently styled a movie as Hitchcock ever made".[21]
Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that "few films play so tightly on the contrast between unimpeachably concrete details and the vertiginous pretenses of reality. Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition."[22]
Chris Balestrero sued the city for false arrest. Asking $500,000, he accepted a settlement of just $7,000. He earned $22,000 from the film (which he reportedly liked), and it went to repaying loans for Rose's care, although she never fully recovered, dying in 1984. Chris died in 1998.[24]
A street in Jackson Heights, Queens, is named "Manny 'The Wrong Man' Balestrero Way", at 73rd Street and 41st Avenue. The street is not far from the former real-life Balestrero home.[25][26][27]
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was an English film director. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today. Known as the "Master of Suspense", Hitchcock became as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo appearances in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65). His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, although he never won the award for Best Director, despite five nominations.
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Bernard Herrmann was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in composing for films. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary."
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Vera June Miles is an American retired actress, best known for roles in the John Ford directed, John Wayne starring Westerns The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) as well as for playing Lila Crane in the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho, later reprising the role in its sequel, Psycho II.
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Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was an English director and filmmaker. Popularly known as the "Master of Suspense" for his use of innovative film techniques in thrillers, Hitchcock started his career in the British film industry as a title designer and art director for a number of silent films during the early 1920s. His directorial debut was the 1925 release The Pleasure Garden. Hitchcock followed this with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, his first commercial and critical success. It featured many of the thematic elements his films would be known for, such as an innocent man on the run. It also featured the first of his famous cameo appearances. Two years later he directed Blackmail (1929) which was his first sound film. In 1935, Hitchcock directed The 39 Steps; three years later, he directed The Lady Vanishes, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.
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David Sterritt is a film critic, author and scholar. He is most notable for his work on Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard, and his many years as the Film Critic for The Christian Science Monitor, where, from 1968 until his retirement in 2005, he championed avant garde cinema, theater and music. He has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is the Chairman of the National Society of Film Critics.
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