Behind the Scenes: The Wrong Man (Hitchcock, 1956) with Henry Fonda and Vera Miles

One of the defining moments for Hitchcock, supposedly, was when he was five years old and his father wanted to teach him a lesson. So he sent him with a note to the chief of police, who was a friend of his. The note said to put him in jail for five minutes. So there was this five-year-old child who was put in jail for five minutes. Well, five minutes can be an awfully long time if you're terrified. And that fear of jail, or particularly police, haunted Hitchcock and haunts Hitchcock's films. And it's no place more evident than in The Wrong Man. The Wrong Man, like I confess, is one of Hitchcock's most serious films. It's based on a real event in which a stork club musician in a movie played by Henry Fonda is accused of an armed robbery he did not commit. He's accused of it because he happens to look like the real robber. There couldn't be a more appropriate Hitchcock title than The Wrong Man since he often dealt with mistaken identity or transference of guilt. In this one, it's dealt with very seriously, however, and so seriously that Hitchcock doesn't even do his usual cameo appearance because he feels it would be distracting. And so instead he begins the movie with a very dramatic shot of himself entering a soundstage and introducing the film. Hitchcock loved to investigate an ordinary guy getting trapped in situations beyond his doing, things that he didn't cause to have happen but just happened to him. And I think it's a very effective movie. I love the movie. It's a great portrait of what New York City was like in 1956. You see so much of the city. You see the inside of the famous old stork club where this guy plays in the orchestra. And I think that by the middle 50s, we were seeing in this country more and more European films being imported. Everybody was getting excited about Rossellini and all the European greats were becoming the new wave. It started in France and everything, and they were getting very turned on by all that. Plus the Hollywood type of movies with pretty people and pretty clothes and a lot of makeup and everything like that were becoming passe. So I think Hitchcock was trying to reinvent himself and also get more of that European realism, and I think he was trying to be more adventurous. I think The Wrong Man is, in the whole Hitchcock canon, the most interestingly off his main line of, even though it's full of his basic themes, it's stylistically such an interesting movie to me. It's written by Maxwell Anderson, who was a very famous playwright, and a playwright who had at some point done rather realistic dramas, was involved a lot with the group theater in New York. So here he's doing something that I think he does very well. I think it's a good script. The impressive thing about the script, and I still say this, and I wish I'd kept a copy, was that you could feel the height of the camera. You could feel the duration of the shot. You really saw the movie when you read the script. It was really that precise. And Hitchcock so storyboarded everything. He had every scene plotted out before he ever filmed a foot of film for many reasons. One of them was because he didn't want to do extra footage, which would allow the studio then to maybe take over the film and recut it. He didn't leave them any extra footage for them to cut with. So he had everything plotted out, but it also allowed him to see the movie before he ever made it. But as he always said, by the time it was time to make the movie, he was bored sometimes with it. He'd already plotted it out, and that was the fun part. Then when he had to turn the camera on, that was work, because he had to make the movie then. Nobody plays The Ordinary Man better than Henry Fonda, who was anything but an ordinary guy, but had that ability to be every man. And it's a tribute to Henry Fonda as an actor that he's able to so completely enter into this Italian store club musician that you really do lose thought that this is Henry Fonda. He was, of course, one of the great American actors and a great American star. One of the few stars that could get away with a performance like this, where his persona was not strong enough to overcome the real person he was playing. He was A, a gentleman, B, a man who never played the star or thought of himself as a star. If the phone rang, and there's always the phone on the stage on a little rolling stand, and if he was sitting in his chair and there was no one around, he would get up and answer it. I mean, that was for sure. He was bright, reasonably well-read, and he painted. He painted like Andrew Wyatt. And after he died, I think, there was a show of his work, maybe more than one, and I've seen reproductions of it. It's quite good. His wife, brilliantly played by Vera Miles, who was originally supposed to play the lead in Vertigo and got pregnant and didn't play it, and Hitchcock never forgave her. But Vera Miles plays the wife, and she gives an extraordinarily subtle and brilliant performance. And the implication is, of course, that she seems to have perhaps believed that he did do it, that he was guilty. And because of that, her guilt drives her crazy. And this poor wife, who perhaps has a moment of distrust, pays for it heavily. And that loss of the love between them is one of the most poignant things about the movie. It's a very sad picture, and again, shows Hitchcock in a mood that is anything but the entertainer. I was fortunate to direct Vera Miles in Psycho II, reprising her part from the first film, and she is an absolute powerhouse on set. The fact that she's very beautiful, I think, probably works against people taking her as seriously as an actress as she would now be taken, I think, if she had been in Vertigo as Hitchcock had intended. But I'm also a great fan of John Ford, and she appears in a couple of great John Ford films, including The Searchers. And I asked her about that, and she was going back and forth between Hitchcock and Ford. And apparently she would arrive on a Ford set, and Ford would say, ''What's the matter? You're talking with a plum in your mouth. You been hanging around with Englishmen or something? What's the problem here?'' And then she would get back to the Hitchcock stable and he would reach around and pretend to take a straw out of her hair and say, ''What do you mean lying in a haystack here, Vera? What are you hanging out with those people for?'' So she was being torn between, arguably, the two greatest directors in the world at the time. Hitchcock was a very easy man to work with. He was very complimentary to everybody whose work was good. The atmosphere was extremely relaxed. The only thing that would frustrate him was method actors who wanted motivation and things like that, and Hitchcock had absolutely no interest in that. I think the famous line is, ''Motivation is you're getting paid.'' You get excited by Hitchcock, you get thrilled by Hitchcock, you hold your breath because of Hitchcock, but not many Hitchcock movies have a scene in which you get emotionally affected by that. And there is the scene where the father comes home and has the scene with the son. But I think that that is not only Hitchcock, but I really think that is Henry Fonda too. I think that very rarely did Hitchcock work with actors that had that emotional range of a Henry Fonda. And it would be interesting to know if that's what Hitchcock was going for or if that just kind of happened because of the scene and the actor. It's a very, very touching movie. And I do think, though, that the one thing we should mention in this movie, because I had forgotten it until I saw it again, is the Catholicism, the business with his rosary. And then the climax of the movie where he is in a hopeless condition. He is going to go to jail. We're pretty convinced of that. And he's staring at this religious picture and he sort of dissolves through and we see the real criminal on a street and heading toward the resolution where he is finally caught. And Hitchcock is loaded with Catholic symbolism. But this is the most overt Catholic symbiology that I've ever seen in a Hitchcock movie. Bernard Herrmann's work with Hitchcock on The Wrong Man was his third film with the director. And Herrmann's music was probably successful primarily in Hitchcock's films because it was very spare. It was very restrained in its construction. And Herrmann's music on The Wrong Man is restrained. It is insistent, even irritating. The Wrong Man is very interesting to me because it relies on a very narrow and concentrated network of ideas and is an excellent example of how that concentrated and subdued approach can be very powerful. This wasn't one of his most successful films. In fact, it wasn't particularly successful at all. But it's a very, very effectively done picture, kind of documentary almost. And Hitchcock used to say that he thought maybe he'd made a mistake by not making it more documentary and less Hitchcockian in the way he shot it. I don't agree. I think The Wrong Man is one of the most emotional of Hitchcock's pictures, told with extraordinary restraint and a sense of reality, just the opposite of the kind of artifice that Hitchcock's famous for and that he popularized. And The Wrong Man is a perfect example of the kind of Hitchcock that you don't expect, which is what gives it part of its extraordinary impact as a film. Thank you very much.