I gave another look at "The Wrong Man," a film I hadn't seen in decades. It was a pretty depressing piece of work. Being a "true story" (the only one Hitchcock made faithfully based on fact) he filmed it in almost documentary form, without a lot of his usual directorial touches (except for a jarring moment where the camera kept shaking, trying to reflect Henry Fonda's inner turmoil and nightmarish dilemma).
Another moment that gave Hitch a chance at some cinematic artiness, was the ultimate scene where Fonda the "Wrong Man" comes face to face with the actual criminal. The images of the two men overlap, but...the effect isn't that convincing because the two men do NOT look alike. How could there have been such an appalling case of mistaken identity?
As Poe's hero of "The Oblong Box" might say, my "old inquisitiveness" got to me, and I decided to find a picture of the actual "Wrong Man," musician Manny Ballestrero, and the guy who was mistaken for him. Guess what, it shows what Hitchcock might call "perverse human nature," because in TRUTH, the two don't look alike:
While Manny does look like more of a weasel, the type who'd commit a petty crime, he doesn't look like Charles. The ears are different. The mouth is completely different. The receding hairline and prominent nose? Maybe similar.
"The Wrong Man" would be much less of a story if one could HONESTLY say "wow, what a fantastic case of lookalikes...the poor guy got into trouble because the eye witnesses couldn't tell the difference." But they could if they weren't so hysterical and myopic. How....HUMAN they were.
To think that a few women would declare that Manny was THE MAN, without a DOUBT! They would swear to it in court, and create a situation that caused tremendous legal and medical fees (Manny's wife had a nervous breakdown and wasn't the same even after 2 years of institutionalized treatment).
Hitchcock had to have been delighted in proving what a nightmare it is getting involved with the police, and how hideous it is to think that "eye witness testimony" is reliable every time.
Ballestrero was so shaken by the ordeal that he quit his job at the Stork Club, left New York City, and moved down to Florida for a new life and a new climate. The deals he signed with Life magazine for a big article on the case, and with Hitchcock for filming is story, barely covered the bills from his lawyer and the sanitarium his wife lived in for two years.
His story remains with us thanks to "The Wrong Man," even if most film buffs consider it one of Hitchcock's flatter, least suspenseful and most grimly unappealing movies. The fine work of a glum, long-suffering Henry Fonda and an increasingly fragile and spooked Vera Miles don't exactly lead one to call the film "entertaining." But as an example of human nature gone wrong, suspicion afoul, and eyewitness foolish, it's all true, and all right.
You can go to YouTube and see Manny attempt to fool a panel including Polly Bergen and Dick Van Dyke via "To Tell the Truth."
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