The Wrong Man

A film set in New York and based on real events. Manny plays bass at a nightclub. He works at night, comes home in the morning and lives with his wife Rose and their two sons. They have no money; they want to borrow against an insurance policy for Rose's dental treatment. Manny goes to the insurance office. The clerks there think he resembles a man who robbed them twice before and call the police. From there the film becomes a procedural: interrogation, identification, fingerprints, custody, bail and trial. Every step is shown in detail, and at every step there is nothing Manny can do. What the film describes is not a crime but how an innocent man moves through a system and what it does to his family. Rose's line comes out of that and is the hardest part of the narrative. The production differs from Hitchcock's usual films: no suspense, no humour and real locations. The director speaks to camera at the start and says the events actually happened. Henry Fonda plays Manny, Vera Miles plays Rose and Anthony Quayle his lawyer. The photography is black and white; the prison and station scenes are shot like documentary. An important production for anyone interested in miscarriages of justice and Hitchcock's lesser known films. For a viewer expecting classic Hitchcock suspense, this one is deliberately cold and slow.