Quick Movie Review: The Wrong Man

6/10

See, being a fan of Once Upon A Time In The West, it's hard for me to sympathise with Henry Fonda, so when he is arrested in a case of mistaken identity I was almost grateful.

This is a Hitchcock movie in black And white (wait.. come back!) and features the only Hitchcock narration - to introduce the film.

Fonda's performance is monumental, simmering with silent anger at the injustice of it all, and this is pretty much the entire plot of the movie described here. Alfred Hitchcock introduces it as "true - every word" and I'm not sure how real a claim this is... It's similar in presentation and tone to the (vastly superior) Strangers On A Train and other early Hitchcock and not really in the same vein as, say, Vertigo or Rear Window.

The concession to character development is that his wife totally loses it halfway through and goes severely AWOL in the brain department. It's pretty well acted, though the understanding of this situation seems a bit archaic now
(lock her in a room to cure paranoid depression? that'll work)

So what we find is a club's double bass player accused of robbing some places on the dodgy eyewitness testimony of a couple of ladies. What was quite cool is how the are so shocked at seeing the man again they don't really look at his face properly, and this is a nice way of showing why they were so wrong. Fans of funny Hitchcock sexism will laugh out loud when they say that the reason he didn't try and rob them again is that in addition to the 10 women behind the counter in the bank, there is a MAN fixing a typewriter. Thank goodness for that!

The Wrong Man is not a glowingly positive view of American justice, I must say, and come the end there's little in the way of comeuppance for the witnesses or the lazy cops, just a return to scraping by and trying to repay the bail money lent by his brother in law.

Harsh... but true.

A