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