The Wrong Man

Wrapping up our current FRAMEWORK series, film scholar Michael van den Bos introduces Hitchcock’s most underrated film, The Wrong Man.

Based on an actual case of a New York musician who was identified as a violent criminal and whose protestations of innocence were never believed, this is the film where Hitchcock’s preoccupation with the fate of an innocent man in the wrong place at the wrong time gets its most severe and soul-searching treatment. It is the odd one out among Hitchcock movies of the 50s: black and white, stripped of glamour and not at all interested in showing us a good time. Yet is one of his greatest accomplishments, a Kafkaesque, expressionist masterpiece, and for all its restraint, one of his most moving films.

Truffaut: “Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and English humour. There is very little suspense in it and almost no humour, English or otherwise. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock’s most stripped down film since Lifeboat; it is the roast without the gravy, the news event served up raw and, as Bresson would say, ’without adornment.’ […] Hitchcock offers a film about the role of the accused man, an accused man and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with documentaries except in appearance; in its pessimism and skepticism I believe it is closer to Night and Fog… In any case, it is perhaps his best film, the one that goes farthest in the direction he chose so long ago.” (1957)

A woefully underrated and truly harrowing study of the psychological cost of misguided suspicion and mistaken identity.

Eric Henderson, Slant

Perhaps his best film.

Francois Truffaut