A Film Canon

The Wrong Man distills one of Hitchcock's archetypal narratives - the man accused of a crime he didn't commit - into the residual noir impulse that haunts his work. As a result, it feels more - and looks less - summative than virtually any other film in his career. Whereas his wrongfully accused protagonists normally find their predicament goes some way towards clarifying the structures that constellate around them, musician 'Manny' Balestrero (Henry Fonda) finds himself trapped in a bureaucratic machine of such overwhelming, Kafkaesque proportions ("a landslide of fear and guilt...a maze of terror") that it takes nothing less than a miracle to escape it. This clarifies paranoia, in its broadest sense, as Hitchcock's pathology of choice; the feeling that every object, however apparently minor or incidental, plays an instrumental role in the state of things, and is therefore capable of acting as a synecdoche for them. However, instead of enlivening the inanimate world, Hitchcock strips it of any local agency, producing an omniscient, threatening opacity that encompasses stark, abstracted sets; Fonda's flat, motionless resignation (which, at times, approaches Bresson's replacement of actor with 'model'); a narrative structure predicated on unecessary, inexplicable repetitions and circumlocutions; a detached, semi-documentary style; and, most spectacularly, Robert Burk's exquisite black-and-white cinematography, which embodies the nervous breakdown that leads to Manny's wife's institutionalisation: "At the moment, her mind is in an eclipse...a frightening landscape that could be on the dark side of the moon." It makes sense, then, that the 'double' should be a more literal figure than in any of Hitchcock's films to date, as if to evoke a world in which individuals have become completely subsumed into demographics, cinematography into surveillance, and surveillance into self-surveillance; screen as mirror.