Manny Balestrero is the bass player at a nightclub in New York. One night he is picked up by the cops and charged with two robberies after some witnesses identify him and he cannot provide an alibi. How can he prove his innocence ?
In sharp contrast to the glamorous, evocative, stylish thrillers of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo which adjoin it in Hitchcock's career, The Wrong Man is a deliberately ordinary, unsensational, frighteningly plausible story of mistaken identity. It was based on a true story, no details were altered and it was shot in many of the actual locations in New York where it happened (notably The Stork Club, a famous hangout in midtown Manhattan). What Hitchcock and Fonda achieve here is a disturbingly real, almost documentary-like portrayal of how it feels to be criminalised. And although Manny only spends a brief time in confinement, the terrible bewildering process is depicted with intense detail. Even worse than the trauma of the arrest are the after-effects on his life, specifically his wife's nervous breakdown, his fruitless search to clear his name and his endless money worries (bail, lawyers, doctors). Hitchcock had a pathological fear of being arrested (he never drove a car so he wouldn't get a ticket) and his film gently but firmly reminds us that no matter how robust any justice system is, there is always the capacity for honest mistake. Nobody deliberately maligns Manny - even the witnesses who ID him genuinely think they're doing the right thing - but he and his family are cruelly victimised and only escape via good fortune. Both Fonda and Miles are excellent in the leads; his Everyman performance ranks with The Grapes Of Wrath and 12 Angry Men (his next film), and she is even better than in her much more famous subsequent appearance for Hitchcock in Psycho. The great director proves here, as he did so often in his career, what a gifted range he had as a filmmaker, skilfully adapting his style to best suit the drama and the atmosphere of the piece. Unusually in this film he does not make a cameo appearance, but instead appears in shadow to deliver a brief introduction.
In sharp contrast to the glamorous, evocative, stylish thrillers of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo which adjoin it in Hitchcock's career, The Wrong Man is a deliberately ordinary, unsensational, frighteningly plausible story of mistaken identity. It was based on a true story, no details were altered and it was shot in many of the actual locations in New York where it happened (notably The Stork Club, a famous hangout in midtown Manhattan). What Hitchcock and Fonda achieve here is a disturbingly real, almost documentary-like portrayal of how it feels to be criminalised. And although Manny only spends a brief time in confinement, the terrible bewildering process is depicted with intense detail. Even worse than the trauma of the arrest are the after-effects on his life, specifically his wife's nervous breakdown, his fruitless search to clear his name and his endless money worries (bail, lawyers, doctors). Hitchcock had a pathological fear of being arrested (he never drove a car so he wouldn't get a ticket) and his film gently but firmly reminds us that no matter how robust any justice system is, there is always the capacity for honest mistake. Nobody deliberately maligns Manny - even the witnesses who ID him genuinely think they're doing the right thing - but he and his family are cruelly victimised and only escape via good fortune. Both Fonda and Miles are excellent in the leads; his Everyman performance ranks with The Grapes Of Wrath and 12 Angry Men (his next film), and she is even better than in her much more famous subsequent appearance for Hitchcock in Psycho. The great director proves here, as he did so often in his career, what a gifted range he had as a filmmaker, skilfully adapting his style to best suit the drama and the atmosphere of the piece. Unusually in this film he does not make a cameo appearance, but instead appears in shadow to deliver a brief introduction.