The Wrong Man
With Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle.
US, 1957, 35mm, black & white, 105 min.
An austere black and white fable dating from the period of Hitchcock’s Technicolor epics, The Wrong Man is the crowning expression of the director’s interest in documentary realism and one of his most overtly religious films. Hitchcock’s favored motif of the cathartic return to a scene of trauma figured into the production itself, with a film employing actual locations and real-life participants to dramatize the true story of a New York musician falsely accused of robbery and his wife’s subsequent mental breakdown. Hitchcock’s characteristic preoccupations with madness, policemen, doppelgangers, money and the transference of guilt are all precisely delineated without the usual leavening of comedy and adventure. Instead, the director patiently interlaces subjective and objective camerawork to draw us into Manny Balestrero’s waking nightmare. A police procedural narrated from the prisoner’s view, in which even the most routine mechanisms of the law seem ominous, The Wrong Man’s saving grace cannot dispel its cruel revelations of fate.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Vertigo
To Catch a Thief
The Trouble with Harry
The Paradine Case
Stage Fright
Rebecca
Notorious
Rear Window
Dial M for Murder
Lifeboat
Saboteur
Murder!
Family Plot
Under Capricorn
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Spellbound
Strangers on a Train
Torn Curtain
Suspicion
Shadow of a Doubt
