The Wrong Man

The Wrong Man (1956) 

Notable cast/crew: Henry Fonda as Manny Balestrero.  Vera Miles as Rose Balestrero.  She would also appear in Psycho.  Anthony Quayle as Frank D O'Connor.  Harold J Stone as Det Lt Bowers.  Nehemiah Persoff as Gene Conforti.  Original Music by Bernard Herrmann.

Running time: 105 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: This is the true story of Manny Balestrero, a man wrongly accused of a string of robberies.  Manny is a bass player at the Stork Club.  He's scraping by to provide for his wife and two kids.  His wife needs some dental work so he goes to the insurance office to see if they can borrow against the policy to cover it.  At the office, the teller behaves oddly and goes to the other tellers.  Several of the women there think he's the same man who robbed the office previously.  They give Manny the information he's asking for about the policy, and he leaves.  They call the police who then go and grab Manny as he walks up to his home.

J'accuse!

The police do a second-rate job of investigating going solely on biased eyewitnesses while having zero physical evidence tying Manny to the robberies.  They railroad him and arrest him for the robberies.  He's bailed out by his family.  As the try to establish his alibi, the only men who could verify his whereabouts have since died although inexplicably no one points out he couldn't have known those other men were all vacationing at the same hotel unless he was there himself.

His wife, Rose begins to crack under the strain of how everything seems stacked against them.  She thinks Manny is going to be found guilty no matter what the evidence, and they have no money to pay for a defense.  She eventually has a nervous breakdown.  He has her committed while the trial is pending.

At trial, Manny notices no one is really paying any attention to the case.  He feels as if he has been abandoned by the system, by his family, maybe even by God.  Amidst all this, a juror stands up during testimony and asks if they have to listen to all this.  A mistrial is declared possibly sparing Manny from being found guilty.  While he awaits a retrial, the real burglar strikes again.  He confesses, and Manny is cleared.  The damage has been done, though.  His life has been upended because of someone else's mistake.

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: Technically not a cameo, Hitchcock introduces the movie.  With this being based on a true story, he didn't want his normal cameo to distract from the seriousness of the story.

Hitchcock themes: 

• Man wrongfully accused

Verdict: This is a powerful movie.  Henry Fonda is fantastic playing Manny.  He's very believable and sympathetic as a man who has done nothing but been wronged at every step of the way by the real crook, the witnesses, and the police.  Vera Miles does a nice job going through the slow collapse into hysteria.  You feel for both of them knowing they're fighting the system alone.

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.  Although based on a true story, Hitchcock deliberately left out some of the information that pointed to Manny's innocence to heighten the tension.

This was Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros.  It completed a contract commitment that had begun with two films produced for Transatlantic Pictures and released by Warner Brothers: Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949).  After The Wrong Man, Hitchcock returned to Paramount Pictures.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: Vertigo