THE WRONG MAN

US, 1957, 105 minutes, Black and white.
Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Wrong Man came in the middle of Hitchcock's period of Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry; Vertigo. It is not typical of these films. Rather it is a more sombre account of innocence and guilt.

Henry Fonda is quite moving in the role of the man charged with the crime he did not commit, the victim of circumstantial evidence, and treated as a prisoner with consequent humiliation. He is a man of integrity in the face of an impossible situation. It is too much for his wife, who breaks down.

Hitchcock has expressed this theme in such films as I Confess. In Frenzy he plays with audience sympathy by making them like criminals and dislike the violent tempered hero who is no murderer. We are all thus accused of being the kind of people who imprison the wrong man because of impression rather than genuine evidence. The Wrong Man is a worthwhile film on a human predicament.

1. Was this a typical Hitchcock film? What did you expect?

2. Comment on the implications and irony of the title.

3. The film stressed at beginning and end that the film was based on life. Show how Manny Balestrero was presented as the ordinary man in the street. Did this make the film closer to the audience? How?

4. Is such a situation possible? What would be the reaction of any person in such a situation?

5. What were your reactions to the people interrogated by the police, and the certainty that Balestrero was the criminal?

6. The nature of the arrest, the interrogation, the entry into prison - how were these illustrated? What impact did these sequences make on the audience? Why?

7. Comment on the portrayal of police work.

8. Your impression of Rose Balestrero: as an ordinary wife, supporting her husband? Why did she change and break down? What moral comment did this make on the film and the characters portrayed?

9. What effect did prison and the whole series of events have on Balestero, the shattering of his whole life, his seeming helplessness, the evidence conspiring against him?

10. The effectiveness of the trial and its effect on Balestrero?

11. The portrayal of the real criminal - how effective when we saw how much he looked like Henry Fonda?

12. The cinema technique of the imposition of the two faces of Henry Fonda becoming the criminal. How effective?

13. Was the realism of this film successful or did it tend to deaden the impact of the incidents?

14. How successful a Hitchcock drama was this? Hitchcock's interest in 'wrong': wrong and mistaken identity, moral right and wrong?

15. Balestrero as a religious man and his prayer supporting him. The influence of his mother? Of his; wife? Balestrero as the innocent man, innocent sufferer? His wife's madness and innocent suffering?