The Frame

One of Hitchcock’s lesser works, The Wrong Man does have its points (which grew on me as I thought about it more), but nowhere near a masterpiece. Manny (Henry Fonda) is a mild-mannered bass player at a nightclub, barely bringing in enough money to support his wife and two young sons. Needing to collect funds to cover a medical procedure, he goes to his insurance agency to borrow against his wife’s policy–but the clerks mistake him for a hold-up man who had robbed the agency (and several other businesses) a few weeks earlier. This leads to his arrest and imprisonment, generating an almost Kafkaesque treatment of the justice system. Several things bothered me, mostly the complete failure of the police to do their investigatory jobs (they never even asked him if he had alibis for the dates in question) and the sense that this might be conspiracy rather than mistaken identity. Hitchcock isn’t usually given to overt red herrings, but this sometimes veered dangerously in that direction. After thinking about it more, obviously both of these elements are meant to add to the random pointlessness of the whole ordeal as seen from Manny’s perspective, yet they still bothered me because it seems Hitchcock gave in here to his own distrust of the police. It is, I think, an interesting film rather than a good one.
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