[Note: This blog
entry was in process for weeks before today’s sad news emanated out of Belgium.
Suffice it to say that, while you (I) don’t know whether it is worse to hear
the content of this news or to endure the tedium and upset of the “haranguing,”
drawn-out way it seems to be covered (at least on the radio), the fun aspects
of this blog entry aren’t meant to make light of the bad news, while on the
other hand, my points about legal process in the U.S. unexpectedly but neatly
serve to show how we get along, or try to, in this country, unlike the more authoritarian and violent style of
the likes of ISIS.]
First, a passing note on Morley Safer (he’s back on TV, showing the
spirit is willing…): [Update 5/12/16: On May 11, CBS announced that Morley Safer is retiring from work at CBS and 60 Minutes.] No, this is not an obituary. Relative old coot that I
am, I enjoy watching 60 Minutes on TV
on Sunday nights. But I realize that, like so much else in American pop and
slightly-more-high-class culture in the past 15 or so years, people have
disappeared (either retired to Florida or elsewhere; been quietly removed from
their positions; or gone to the next world—with attendant or coincidental broad
changes in what passes for market-wise stuff in the media, increasingly
oriented to the likes of rabid fans of Jennifer Lawrence). Well, Morley Safer
was the last of the old-time 60 Minutes
crew, the bunch that started in the late 1960s and ’70s, like Mike Wallace (now
deceased), Andy Rooney (ditto; he started in the late ’70s, but still seeming
an original member), and even producer Don Hewitt (deceased). I made a loving
joke about Morley in this fall 2012 blog entry: Movie break: An “adult picture” on an issue that concerns
everyone—corporate malfeasance affecting nationally distributed products and
health: The Insider (1999), Part 2 of 2; URL here.
My point there wasn’t to scorn Morley; it was to speak with humor such as I try
to make typical of my blogs, but trying to bridge my own long familiarity with
Morley with likely audiences’ younger-eye aesthetics: I could say, “You know
Morley Safer, right?” and they could say, “But he looks so old—like he’s 600.”
So, how joke by way of sharing my enthusiasm for someone who seems “so old”?
Well, much more recently, I’d
wondered where Morley has been for some time. When Bob Simon died in early
2015, Morley was quoted (on TV camera) in a news item; he looked older and
seemed to speak with a bit of a slur. Was he, over the longer term, not well
enough to appear on TV anymore? Then, this past March 13, he had a segment on 60 Minutes, interviewing a newly
arrived, successful Danish architect. As a longtime connoisseur of 60 Minutes pieces, I was struck by how
many different “edits” of Morley’s narrated comments there were—I mean, no
surprise such piecemeal editing can go on, but his voice sounded quite
different in different bits. Sometimes he seemed a bit slur-apt and mannered;
other times, like his old self.
But let’s be charitable, along my
with speculating (and of course, how he’s doing in his health is in large part
his own “bee’s wax”): he sometimes speaks not entirely well (effect of
medication? Did he have a minor stroke? Is some other ailment responsible?);
his face seems to show a light as if he’s emerged transcendently from the
shadows of less-than-full health, but I thought on March 13 that his eyes
looked a bit unusual: had he had an operation on them? For cataracts? And I
noticed in one or two shots that he was standing with a cane, which he’d never
been shown using before.
So, at age 84, he’s no longer in
JV-football-player health. But it was good to see him back on TV, doing a
segment with, intellectually, the allusive richness and elegant phrasing we’ve
come to expect from him. You know the poem, “Death, be not proud…”; well,
allowing old veterans in the media to do their thing in advanced age is a way
of saying, “Old age (and possible
need for Geritol and adult undergarments), be
not proud….”
Subsections below (Part 1):
The film takes a
civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s
Hitch opted for an
exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort
Basic facts about the
case, and Manny’s stigmatization
Typical Hitchcock
touches
Subsections to come in Part 2:
Herrmann’s restrained
score both helps define this 1956 film and is one shared trait among several between
this film and 1976’s Taxi Driver
The casting, and the
question of Hitchcock’s Catholicism
Vera Miles is excellent
as the acutely depressed Rose; and elements of psychological understanding and
of joking
I’m glad I finally got to see The Wrong Man, after having
heard about it in various contexts for a good number of years. For today’s
young audiences, even if they are eager to make the acquaintance of Hitchcock,
this could well be kept for their later viewing, when they’re older. I think that,
for the average caffeine-charged, body-pierced, smartphone-addicted avid young
filmlover, it’s about as “happening” as chewing on a feather duster. But to me
in my older years, already well familiarized with Hitch, I found this film
quite pleasant to check out, though, at least at first, my pleasure was often in
how technically it was made. Vera Miles in
her performance as Rose, the wife of the wrongly-accused hero (“Manny”
Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda), is
quite good, and a big step up from the relatively small part she plays as the
pinched, impatient sister of Marion Crane in Hitch’s Psycho (1960).
The interesting thing about this film is that, while it was
famously based on a real-life case of mistaken identity/arrest/trial that was
featured in a magazine in 1953 and was even portrayed in a 1950s TV movie of
some kind, it was the first time Hitchcock portrayed a real-life situation in a
feature-length film. He even appears in a direct-to-the-camera introduction,
explaining the basic situation—that this work, as a nonfictional suspense
story, features more odd twists than did the fictional stories he’d earlier presented.
The film takes a
civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s
But this film isn’t just an entertaining technical stunt
from Hitchcock (or one of “biographical import,” in relation to the oft-told
story of how his father had had five-year-old Alfred put in a jail cell to
teach him a lesson, which supposedly haunted Alfred ever after). It comes among
several films of the 1950s by various directors that dealt, in ways different
in content or angle, with issues of miscarriage of justice, abuse of legal process,
mistaken identity in a legal context, and/or the like. On the 2008 DVD for Touch of Evil, commenter and professor
James Naremore mentions how there were more films that addressed social justice
in the 1950s, which is otherwise thought of as a drily conformist decade, than
there tend to be today (on average; he spoke in ~2008), while Touch of Evil was also radical (in his
approving view) in its esthetic approach.
But it’s true that social and legal issues were embraced in
what now seems a surprisingly concentrated way in that later-Eisenhower era,
not just with Welles’ 1958 film, which deals with corruption of personality impacting
detective work (centered on falsified evidence), but with Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957), which today helps teach
us how a jury should function regarding the issue of reasonable doubt; and even
Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory
(1957), particularly in its trial scene, where the theme of a railroading “show
trial,” where men are wrongly tried and convicted for symbolic reasons or in
order to intimidate a broader populace, is especially well depicted. (Whatever
public consciousness there was throughout the 1950s of the Stalinist show
trials of the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the associated novelistic derivative
by Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon,
along with considered review of the McCarthyist abuses of the early 1950s—à la
anti-Communist witch hunts—all would have provided important cultural
background to the 1950s films’ intellectual agendas.)
Hitch’s film may seem the most subdued and buttoned-down, in
a sense, of all these films, but together they show that on some level,
intelligent members of society were concerned with the questions of what to do
when, even in an enlightened society like the U.S.’s, the justice system
malfunctions? And this was a few years before the Miranda decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, instituting guarantees
of the rights of arrested citizens to their being shielded from improper
treatment by investigating officers. While Hitchcock’s film also deals, as do
these other films, with matters falling under criminal (or military) law (and
even if Hitch was concerned, somewhat like Franz Kafka, with the dark,
going-haywire potential of these situations, especially in their psychological
impact on the innocent victims), still, whether in a civil-law context or not,
the theme of a justice system going screwy, whether due to bad-faith
motivations or simple mistakenness, is something that never gets old, and never
loses its relevance if Americans want to be good citizens and act in line with
consciousness of how their justice system is never foolproof and perfect, and
needs vigilant citizens “looking in” to “keep it honest,” just as any other
institution of our society needs this vigilance.
(This point can be bolstered in two ways: First, when it
comes to the likes of recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,
the legal philosophy that the U.S. Constitution should only be said to contain,
and extend to modern citizens as legal guarantees, what it was “originally”
meant to contain [which many could very well consider the views of a rightist
crank], should cohere with the fact that we citizens do not want to be in a
position to demonstrate, when the occasion warrants, that the Constitution also
does not contain language of an especially colorful and coarse nature that we
are all too willing to produce volcanically when we protest about being
egregiously and self-evidently mishandled by agents of the state. Second, in
work situations, ethical complexities or conundrums between peer, low-level
workers who have run into conflict within ingenuous frames of mind can be
assessed differently years later; but bad management whose egregiousness is
clear at the outset never loses its status as bad management.)
Hitch opted for an
exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort
The Wrong Man also
was Hitch’s way of imitating a film genre that was newly coming to the
States—“kitchen-sink realism,” as it was informally dubbed, or a kind of
neorealism that was first being propagated by new Italian filmmakers. I think
that, today, one need not be familiar with this genre, or even ask how well (or
how much) Hitchcock captures its style in this film. What I think stands the
test of time is that, in this kind of story, how the camera follows the
proceedings in an almost plodding, hug-the-droll-details way actually helps
convey what an alienating experience being wrongly accused and arrested (or
otherwise subjected to a high-stakes legal proceeding) can be. Though little
moments in this story may seem rather trite or tedious on second or third
viewing, the film overall rewards multiple viewings, not just for how
technically adept it is, but for how the simple fear and almost soul-crushing
sense of damaged name and (family) prospects can explode in a normal, quiet
life when the machinery of the state suddenly enters and marches you through
its procedures without any real justification in fact.
Hitchcock interviewed various participants in the real case
and tried to get his story as close to the facts as possible (Patrick McGilligan,
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and
Light [ReganBooks, 2003] pp. 534, 536). He also had the services of playwright
Maxwell Anderson, a famed name of the
time, who had both written a book on the case [added 3/24/16: Actually, as I look into this, while the Wikipedia article on the film suggests he wrote a book on the case, a brief Google search does not show me solid support for this, and McGilligan does not indicate it, either] and co-wrote the script for
Hitchcock; the script has a conscientious, level-headed way of walking us
through all the details most key to a digestible story. Angus MacPhail also helped with the screenplay (and both
Anderson and MacPhail would be tapped by Hitch to work on the succeeding film Vertigo, though neither ended up in the
final credits, though some of their ideas [or, in MacPhail’s case, his ethnic
background] did contribute to that film).
Then, Hitch used his trusty production team of Robert Burks
for cinematography (here, atypically for Burks, working in black-and-white,
which comes out fine, giving the film a noir flavor without being stagy); George
Tomasini for editing (the film is quite crisply edited, even with some scenes
fading out almost too quickly); and Bernard Herrmann for music, along with
Herbert Coleman for associate producing (check all Hitch’s major films of
1954-64 for the presence of members of this production team).
The production director for this film was Paul Sylbert (born
1928), brother of the equally illustrious production designer Richard, and Paul
speaks on the 2004 DVD.
With Hitch’s standard way of storyboarding an entire film
(shot by shot), which is one thing that makes his films still so watchable
today, The Wrong Man is quite well
put together, even if the story might not grip or affect everybody, equally, today.
This story is helped in accessibility by being made by a crack production team
at the top of their game within a succession of films that is possibly one of
the most artistically successful trains of consecutive films by one director in
all of cinema (I’ve seen all of Hitch’s films from 1954 to 1964 except for all
of To Catch a Thief [1955], which to
me has always seemed like fluff I could just as well skip). (It’s like the
phenomenon of how even a relative clunker within the series of films done by Steven
Spielberg within his decade-plus of mostly adult films, from 1993, the year of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, to about 2005, the year of Munich, still seems well done, because a prime director in his
fifties is steadily working, and fully effectively, with trusted associates.)
Basic facts about the
case, and Manny’s stigmatization
How much the specific facts of this story reflect, bit for
bit, the facts of the real case isn’t entirely clear, but it seems the general
method Hitchcock used was to follow all the relevant facts, no matter how
mundane. Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a player of an acoustic stand-up bass
in a dance band at the Stork Club in NYC, stopped by a life insurance company
office to see about taking out a loan on his wife’s policy (this sort of thing
is still possible to do, as I did it back in the 1990s) to cover expenses. In
this case, the emergent expense was $300 for extraction of impacted wisdom
teeth his wife had. Early on, when the family seems in hunky-dory spirits, the
couple acknowledges they have to struggle a bit with money at times, but his
wife doesn’t yet give the sense of guilt and doom she does later (though a
passing remark she makes foreshadows it); the later development is her contracting
an acute case of major depression (eventually requiring her to go to inpatient
treatment), apparently precipitated by her husband’s arrest. In this later case,
her depression not only builds on her feeling that she has brought the
misfortune on them because (as she blames herself unfairly) she isn’t a good
wife in handling money well, but eventually she starts talking paranoid, as if
“they” will break the family down through willy-nilly prosecution of the case
so that Manny is imprisoned no matter what they do.
When Manny stops by the insurance company, some women
working there suddenly get the notion he was the man who had robbed them some
weeks ago (the time of the film is mid-January 1953, and some of the robberies
the film refers to happened the previous fall and Christmas season). The film
is good at the camera’s coming in close and showing the insurance workers
engaging in a kind of acutely worried hugger-mugger, discussing the man at the
window (Manny) whom they think is the crook, back for more, even though he is
ostensibly asking about his wife’s policy. Shortly after, a level-headed male supervisor
will talk to someone at the home office, and eventually—when Manny has left the
insurance company office—the police arrange to pick Manny up on his way home
and start having him visually inspected by witnesses, and test his handwriting,
to see if he is the suspect. From then on, Manny is locked into a
mistaken-identity situation, which Hitchcock did in a number of his films.
Ironically, in this film, Manny’s name is “mishandled” several times, with some
people assuming he goes by “Chris” (short for Christopher), not the “Manny” his
close associates know him by; the implication seems to be not only does he
become mistakenly in the custody of the city police, but his name gets mangled,
adding further to the indignities and rather Kafkaesque oblivion he is sunken
into.
Interestingly, near the end of the film, though two of the
insurance company women are again enlisted to help identify the real crook, and
they spot Manny with his steadfast lawyer at the police station, they hesitate regarding
Manny as if feeling awkward but opt not to apologize to him. And the only
person Manny confronts in any sense is the crook when the man is ushered past
him, and Manny asks him, “Do you know what you did to my wife?” The fact that
the insurance woman-workers are never held to account in the story probably
reflects Hitchcock’s assessment of these particular women as rather blameworthy
in the whole case; it’s more debatable whether this also conforms with his complex
and “characteristic” way of regarding women, which of course some have summed
up as misogynistic, and which in any event can be at times on the peculiar
side, but let’s not go there right now.
##
Some details of the police work are interesting. Of the two
cops who do the initial investigating, one, an Italian-looking fellow who does
most of the procedural talking and managing, seems trying to be judicious
toward Manny, only really starting to seem biased against him after the rather
dubious handwriting test is done. The other man, a blond, rather cool-looking
sort, seems to regard Manny as guilty from the outset, having a steady,
skeptical smile at him when questioning him on something. This reminded me of
nothing so much as the character played by Richard Anderson in the trial scene
in Paths of Glory, where Anderson’s
prosecuting attorney is so bemused and indifferent to the fact he is part of a
process of a foreordained conviction of the three soldiers, that his smug manner
almost seems wildly satirical, if not for how carefully Kubrick handles the
Stalinist quality of the trial, overall.
(The blond policeman in The
Wrong Man much later “does penance,” spontaneously becoming something of a
hero, by suddenly being seized by some recognition of a possibility after he
has passed the new robbery suspect being brought into the 110th
precinct station, the one in charge of Manny’s case. He returns to the office
after almost having left for home, presumably to get the ball rolling on having
the new “collar’s” case being collated with Manny’s case, toward possibly
getting Manny freed from his original case.)
Despite the overall premise that Hitchcock is showing a
legal process that is wrong on a key premise (the identity of their suspect)
and from then on seems a headlong Kafkaesque nightmare of sorts, the subtlety
and tone of the overall proceedings are kept modest and sensible. No burlesque
or pointed satire here.
Another thing that seems amusing today is that the attorney
helping Manny, Frank O’Connor (Anthony Quayle, to be discussed more in Part 2),
who seems all earnest about wanting to help once he’s heard Manny’s story,
warns that he has never defended a criminal defendant in a trial before—which
in real life would normally be a big red flag, not that the attorney isn’t
sincere—and he says they shouldn’t worry about money now (Manny and Rose and
already super-strapped); instead, he counsels, let’s just win the case. This is
awfully noble of the attorney, and maybe it was something that could happen in
the 1950s on behalf of the right, winning-seeming defendant. But this was
before the Supreme Court case that established the right to a free public
defender for criminal defendants who are indigent; and certainly in this
country today, if you are in a civil (not criminal) case, if you have no money
for an attorney, no likes of Frank O’Connor is likely to come gallantly your
way.
But these quibbles aside, there is enough realistic about
this film, or about which we could give the benefit of the doubt, that it is
interesting to watch for me, and I would think for anyone old enough to have
lost the “baby teeth” of innocent illusions about the U.S. legal system,
especially if the person has been in the teeth of a frivolous or abusive
proceeding in the past.
Typical Hitchcock
touches
It is a measure of how Hitchcock remains an influence and a
sort of seminal director that this film is so watchable, and a treasure chest
of things to point out as characteristic of his style and, subsequently, of
film techniques that have long been adopted by others. By comparison with The Ladykillers (1955), which I reviewed
in two parts spread over this blog and my other one, The Wrong Man is a ready delight to watch just for how well it is
visually made, whereas The Ladykillers
you have to work up some enthusiasm for.
Because The Wrong Man
is in black-and-white, there are certain techniques that were already typical
by 1956, and often seen in noir, such as “deep focus,” where all persons in a
shot are equally in focus, no matter how close they are to the camera. But
there is one Hitchcock visual touch—I mean in addition to his variety of interest-generating
camera angles and interspersing medium shots with close-ups—that runs through a
lot of his films, at least as late as Topaz
(1969), which you usually see in his color films: having a table lamp appear conspicuously
in a shot, which seems there to elicit some sense of space between us and one
or more character(s) in the shot. Sometimes a scene can be split up into shots
where they vary as to whether they feature a lamp. We can find this phenomenon
in his great-period films Vertigo and
North by Northwest (1959). We see it several times in this film, too.
Another touch is using a visual trick, involving no tiny
amount of creative engineering, to evoke a sense of acute psychological
distress or some other evanescent phenomenon. In Rear Window (1954), we see the pinkish after-image (in Raymond
Burr’s character’s eyes) of the flashbulb going off. In Vertigo, we see (especially in the church tower shots) the famous
“trombone shot” of a distance-covering image change in elemental texture to
show Scottie’s sudden bout of dizziness. And in The Wrong Man, there is a relatively simple shot of Manny sitting,
seeming exhausted, in a jail cell, with the shot starting to turn around as if
done on a ferris wheel (in fact, it was, on
a small custom-made “ferris wheel”), while the music, per Herrmann, evokes the
spinning, increasing-chaos sense. This effect may seem a little hokey today,
but the intent is appreciated.
Another shot a bit later has Manny in his new cell, with the
camera peering at him through a narrow hole in the door (the special DVD extra,
Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man,
explains something about how this was done), and he paces around a bit; and
when he hears his name being called, Fonda gives him a confused, paranoid look,
as if he can’t grasp what he’s hearing. As it turns out, he is going to be
released from his cell, because his bail has been posted. By this point in the
film, Hitchcock has gone a long way to show Manny’s emotional dislocation
caused by an arrest we will find is firmly established as wrongly based.
Manny will further prove to be emotionally traumatized when,
for instance, as he arrives home, he looks leerily at the place in the street across
from his house where the police had been waiting for him two nights ago.
Hitchcock was an early master at explicitly depicting psychological dislocation
in an age when the popular audiences were hungry for it in films and
literature.
To be continued.
