The Wrong Man
Short description
Set in New York in 1953, The Wrong Man follows Manny Balestrero, a jazz musician and family man of modest means. When he visits an insurance office to arrange a loan, employees mistake him for the man who robbed the same office days earlier. He is arrested, and the case against him builds as witnesses identify him and handwriting evidence appears to confirm their accounts. Released on bail, Manny tries to establish his whereabouts at the time of the robberies, but the men who could support his account prove difficult to trace. Meanwhile, the strain of the ordeal takes a severe toll on his wife Rose, who suffers a breakdown and requires psychiatric care.
Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail. It was the thirty-third of the forty-three films he directed, arriving between The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 and Vertigo in 1958. Henry Fonda plays Manny, with Vera Miles as Rose and Anthony Quayle as Frank D. O'Connor in a credited cast of thirty-eight. Warner Bros. Pictures released it, and against a budget of about one million dollars it returned roughly twice that worldwide.
On IMDb, the film holds a critics' rating of 8.1 out of 10 from twenty-seven reviews, while on TMDB it has an audience rating of 7.1 out of 10 from more than six hundred votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- “That man” (the real criminal) appears in the frame several times: outside the “Stock” club, in Victor Moore Passage, and near the liquor store where Manny is arrested by the police.
- Victor Mur's Passage was demolished in the late 1990s to make way for a new transport interchange.
- When Manny walks down the prison corridor, there is nothing on the pillow in the cell. A moment later, when he is inside the cell, a mug appears on the pillow.
- The prison in the film was real. As Manny is led to his cell, you can hear one of the real inmates shout “What'd they get ya for, Henry?” during filming, followed by the laughter of other inmates.
- The film is based on a well-known New York criminal case involving a double bass player from Queens, arrested on January 13, 1953, which Hitchcock read about in Life magazine. In the film, Hitchcock deliberately omits some details of the case that suggest the suspect's innocence.
- Despite the text in the film's epilogue stating that Rose Balestrero fully recovered two years after her husband's acquittal, in reality, she never fully recovered mentally. Almost all of the money her husband managed to obtain from lawsuits and the sale of rights went to pay for her stay in a sanatorium.
- As in most of his films, Hitchcock planned to appear in a cameo in one of the scenes. He even filmed a scene where he was standing in the ‘Stock’ club near where Manny was sitting. But he later cut it and filmed a prologue with his participation.
- This is the only Hitchcock film in which his voice can be heard (in a monologue at the beginning of the film).
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
