Henry Fonda is wrongly accused of armed robbery in this interesting fact-based entry in the filmography of the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock…

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenwriters: Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail (story by Maxwell Anderson)

Based on: The real-life experiences of Manny Balestrero. While the script does not credit a source, an account of the real-life tale was published in Life Magazine (‘A Case of Identity’ by Herbert Brean, 1 February 1954).

Synopsis:

*Spoilers* New York City, 1953. Christopher Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is a bass player in a nightclub band, who lives a happy but cash-strapped life with his wife Rose (Vera Miles) and their children. One day, Manny goes to an insurance office to ask about borrowing money against his wife’s policy to pay for dental treatment. One of the office clerks wrongly identifies Manny as the man who held up the office a few months previously and took several hundred dollars. The police talk to Manny and he is ultimately arrested. Out on bail, Manny and Rose contact a lawyer and try to track down alibi witnesses. The whole process takes its toll on Rose, who ends up in a sanatorium. Meanwhile, Manny goes to trial. Eventually, the real robber attempts to pull another job and is arrested, clearing Manny. Rose rejects Manny, but we learn that she eventually overcame her mental illness and the whole family moved to Florida.

Analysis:

*Spoilers* At the very beginning of The Wrong Man, Hitchcock appears on screen to foreshadow the fact that what we are about to see is real. Indeed, as well as being factually faithful, the film was shot in the actual New York locations in which the real-life story happened, and Hitchcock even painstakingly recreated the courthouse setting. Read Herbert Brean’s article about the real Manny Balestrero and you realise just how close the film is to his actual story. Wherein lies the problem. The story is pretty far-fetched and structured in such a way that makes it difficult to build into an effective screen narrative.

The character of Manny and his daily routine are quickly established. While he works in a nightclub as a musician, he’s a consummate family man, who is steady, reliable and honest. This is crucial, as it heightens the nightmarish scenario when the cops take him away. One of Hitch’s great strengths was his ability to put the viewer in the shoes of the protagonist and, in this instance, it’s easy to see how Manny’s predicament could happen to anyone.

Indeed, the most effective scenes occur when Manny is first accosted outside his house and taken to the police precinct for questioning. His innocent everyman reactions contrast with the cops, who clearly believe they have the right man (even though there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary). However, the case against him is weak and the process by which the cops build that case is highly suspect, leaving many questions over how they could be so sure that they had the right man. For example, they never ask about an alibi, hunt down physical evidence, or consider why a man who brazenly robbed an insurance office would later walk back into that same office unarmed to request a loan. They simply base their conclusions on some dodgy IDs, a handwriting error, and the fact that Manny was in need of money.

All this might reflect the real Balestrero’s experience (and also the way the cops operated in the 1950s) but it jars a little and takes away from what was obviously a harrowing experience.

Once Manny is released on bail, the story also suffers a little from the chain of events. Manny and his wife Rose head out to track down alibi witnesses but when they hit a dead-end, the hitherto calm and loving Rose is suddenly pitched into a full-on mental breakdown, with little to no causative steps in between. She simply breaks down. Again, this may have actually happened but from a narrative viewpoint, her fall feels too abrupt. Tweaking the story to give us stronger indication of her declining mental fragility would have smoothed this decent. Likewise, the resolution is a little problematic, with the real robber conveniently showing up before the jury can render a verdict in Manny’s second trial (the first ending in a mistrial), leaving the wrong man free to go.

Of course, this being Hitchcock, many of these challenges are met head on in his inimitable style, using his masterful talent for building suspense and character. So, while The Wrong Man is not quite a classic in the Hitch filmography, it is certainly an interesting example of how an ‘auteur’ and his screenwriters went to great lengths to authentically tell a compelling true story.

A note on the adaptation:

The phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ can cause problems when it comes to adapting fact-based tales for the screen. What we might believe happened in real life can stretch credulity when it forms part of a fictionalised tale. Even though an actual district attorney and a New York City Police Department sergeant advised the production, The Wrong Man suffers a little from its fact-based roots and its adherence to the real-life events. Rose’s seemingly ‘out of nowhere’ descent into mental breakdown, the wafer thin evidence the cops use to nail Manny, and the deus ex machina-style ending, in which the real baddie pops up and clears our hero may all have happened to the real Balestrero, but as beats in a fictional narrative, they strike a little false. In this instance, Hitch may well have been better served by taking the simple premise of ‘family man is wrongly accused of a serious crime’ to develop an original, suspenseful narrative along the lines of North by Northwest (1959).

The lesson is that while adapting real life for the screen can work wonderfully, sometimes the flexibility that originality offers can produce a more dramatically satisfying outcome.