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The Wrong ManRating:
Release Date: 07 September, 2004 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: |
The Wrong Man Reviews
Alfred Hitchcock Does Docudrama. A Nice Unassuming Performance by Henry Fonda.
"The Wrong Man" was written by playwright Maxwell Anderson and directed by Alfred Hitchcock based on the true story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a man wrongly accused of a series of armed robberies in New York City in 1953, only a couple of years before the film was made. "Manny" Balestrero (Henry Fonda) was a family man and a musician at New York's Stork Club. One day he visits the office of his life insurance company to find out how much his wife Rose (Vera Miles) can borrow against her insurance policy to finance some badly needed dental surgery. The insurance company has been held up a couple of times by a man claiming to have a gun, and the teller is convinced that Manny looks like the culprit. Charged with armed robbery and misidentified by witnesses, Manny hopes to find people to corroborate his alibis. When that fails, the situation takes a toll on Rose's mental state.
"The Wrong Man"'s primary objective is to give the impression of a loss of control. The most disturbing aspect of Manny's predicament is that he is at the mercy of an impersonal system that doesn't know or care about him and from which he cannot escape. Manny is an easy-going guy who is bewildered by the unjust turn of events but always optimistic. His wife Rose is less naïve and more proactive at first, but more emotionally fragile, ultimately tormented by feelings of guilt and persecution. Manny's helplessness and distress are expressed graphically in his scenes of confinement in the jail. Alfred Hitchcock excels at communicating the horror of being caged, though I could have done without the camera moving in circles. That conveyed a feeling of nausea more than confinement. "The Wrong Man" has some nice scenes of New York City circa 1956, including some filmed inside the Stork Club. The style of cinematography vacillates between documentary-like realism and more stylized Hitchcockian camera work.
The DVD (Warner Brothers 2004): "Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man" (20 minutes) is part commentary and part making-of documentary featuring interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, film historians Robert Osborne and Richard Schickel, the film's art director Paul Sylbert, and Christopher Husted, the manager of composer Bernard Herrmann's estate. They talk about the film's themes and the cast. Sylbert recalls filming and technical details. And Husted talks about the film's score. There is also a theatrical trailer (2 ½ min). Subtitles are available in English and French. Dubbing is available in French.
Great Realist Movie Influenced by Avante Garde 1950s
I found this movie to be very poignant. Especially the scenes where Rose Ballestrero (Vera Miles), is losing her mind. Some people have commented that it seems overacted. For some reason, any display of emotion in older movies is looked as campy by contemporary audiences. Maybe people need to stop referring to their own emotions as the way "everyone acts" and start having an open mind. Realism doesn't mean imposing your definition of "real" on everyone else. It certainly doesn't mean imposing your "reality" on a film that is empathetic to its characters, from fifty years ago.
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