The Wrong Man

Synopsis

One of Hitchcock's few films based on a true story, The Wrong Man stars Henry Fonda as Manny Balestrero, a man tried for crimes committed by a lookalike robber, with Vera Miles as his distraught wife Rose, driven to madness by the ordeal. Real-life Balestrero case witnesses were cast in small roles and the film was shot in many actual locations, among them the Stork Club, Manny's jail cell and Rose's sanatorium.

"The beauty of each of these close-ups, with their searching attention to the passage of time, comes from the sense that necessity is intruding on triviality, essence on existence. The beauty of Henry Fonda's face during this extraordinary second which becomes interminable is comparable to that of the young Alcibiades described by Plato in The Banquet. Its only criterion is the exact truth. We are watching the most fantastic of adventures because we are watching the most perfect, the most exemplary, of documentaries." – Jean-Luc Godard, 1957