An innocent man has nothing to fear.
The Wrong Man (1956) is an interesting split-genre film, in which a procedural crime mystery morphs into a psychological drama, like a trial run for Psycho (1960).
This film, according to Wikipedia, based very closely on a true story, is a study how of an ordinary working family man in New York City, accused of being a hold-up robber, becomes deeply embroiled in the US legal system.
The title, The Wrong Man, suggests a case of mistaken identity, but the opening scenes, in which we meet the protagonist, Manny (Henry Fonda) introduce small fragments of doubt. Manny is shown to be a quiet sober man with a steady job as a musician in a nightclub, a loving husband and beloved father to two young boys. Manny's wife, Rose (Vera Miles), needing expensive dental treatment, despairs of their constant struggle to make ends meet, but Manny reminds her of all the good things in their life, and reassures her that, in the short term, they can borrow money on her life insurance policy, like they did before on his life insurance policy, and that, in the long term, things will somehow work out all right.
So far so good: Manny seems to be satisfied with his lot. But when he opens his evening paper, his eyes are drawn to advertisements for luxury products, well beyond his means, promoted aspirationally as improving the quality of family life, and he turns from these to the horse racing form pages where he starts making notes in the margins, in the way that nowadays in the UK many working people with dreams of sudden wealth turn to the lottery or scratch cards. Could Manny be less honest than he seems? Could he have a secret vice? Where is he going to get the money for Rose's operation?
That afternoon, at the insurance office, Manny, with his wife's insurance policy in his pocket, dressed like almost all the men in this film in dark suit and tie, overcoat and hat, enters and is "recognised" as the man who held up the office the previous month.
Most of the rest of the film is a Kafkaesque nightmare (Kafka's The Trial, 1925, is the ultimate fictional legal conundrum, where the protagonist, K, can't even determine what crime he is being charged with) in which Manny is led through a judicial process where the labyrinthine progress of the legal machinery is so inexorable and inflexible and inhuman that circumstantial evidence is sufficient to point the finger of guilt and protestations of innocence are routine, making a mockery of the film's tagline, "An innocent man has nothing to fear".
Arrested outside his house, Manny is interviewed by detectives, then subjected to a series of witness and other types of identity tests, each of which seems to be technically flawed in some way, then formally charged and inducted into the US legal system. The filmmakers take care to show in precise detail the steps in the process, and how clinically de-humanising the process is. With an array of witnesses and other evidence positioned against him, as the detectives point out, it all looks very bad for Manny. If he cannot find cast-iron alibis, it seems that he will be found guilty.
I imagine Hitchcock was attracted to this true story partly because of its Kafkaesque aspect, but mainly because of the other, more overtly psychological, aspect, which comes in the final reel, in which the prospect of a physical prison gives way to the horror of a metaphorical mental prison, a prison of ideas, a theme which will be explored more thrillingly in the film Psycho.
Fonda, with his back catalogue of likeable honest characters, e.g. Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), is brilliantly cast in a role calling for a person audiences of the time would have assumed was innocent. His performance is very understated, like a blank that the audience can project themselves into. Interesting to read in his Wikipedia entry that, unlike daughter Jane, schooled in the Stanislavski / Strasberg Method, he was an intuitive actor without conscious technique. As for age, as is so common in the old Hollywood contract system, he was a good deal older than his character, a 51-year old playing 38. Vera Miles handles her role very well, nicely underplaying the dramatic challenges.
References
- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Writers: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
- Starring: Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold Stone, Charles Cooper
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 11 Aug 2011
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in WriteRoom, formatted using TextWrangler and HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro
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