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Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man - Page 2

© David Macdonald

Hitchcock seems gleeful in giving us moment after moment of incriminating evidence - he catches us, like Fonda's character, in a web of deceit. The movie is called The Wrong Man, so clearly Fonda's character is innocent. We feel intensity at his experiences, and we wonder if perhaps there is something he did do that may have caused him to be arrested..... some sort of mistake, maybe. And there are some moments where we just cannot believe his bad luck, including a classic moment where Fonda is asked to write down the cop's dictation of a note that the robber passed to the teller at the bank. Fonda's printing is almost identical to that of the robber, but that isn't as bad as a tiny grammatical mistake that Fonda makes during the dictation, which essentially seals the case as far as the detectives are concerned. Hitchcock is able to make us identify with Fonda's plight, to walk in his shoes, which we have to if we are able to understand and fear what it would be like to be an innocent person wrongly accused.

The Wrong Man has the weird experience of two endings, as in The Woman in the Window, although here it is not quite as fatal. The last scene gives us a great ironic twist, yet after this comes a written follow-up which tells us where they are now -- and of course, it's a happy follow-up. Since this is supposedly based on fact, the titles are forgivable.... yet the fact that the last scene is what it is suggests that Hitchcock really did want to end the movie on a melancholy note. And that last scene is going to stick to our minds longer than some silly closing titles. I still finished the movie with a strange feeling that things between the couple will never be the same again.

I think it's interesting to see Henry Fonda in a Hitchcock movie. Fonda doesn't exactly strike me as a Hitchcock protagonist, but then again Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant didn't strike me in that way either at first. I think it's because I suffer from the Psycho syndrome - people from my generation think of that movie, essentially the prototype for the slasher flick, when they think of Hitchcock. They don't think of the guy from It's a Wonderful Life, or Wyatt Earp from My Darling Clementine! They also don't think of Hitchcock as the maker of more classier films (although Psycho's pretty good too) such as Rear Window, North by Northwest, and the like. Too bad!! In my dreams, I'm picturing what it would be like to have seen Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne in a Hitchcock movie! What a crazy guy I am!!

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