Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

The Wrong Man Blu-ray Movie Review

Falsely Accused

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 25, 2016

Alfred Hitchcock famously observed that, while some films are slices of life, his were "slices of cake". An exception is The Wrong Man, the director's scrupulously accurate re-creation of the arrest and trial of New York musician Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero in January 1953 for crimes he didn't commit. After reading about Balestrero's case in Life magazine, Hitchcock commissioned a script by playwright Maxwell Anderson (The Bad Seed), which was then reworked by Angus McPhail, the screenwriter of Spellbound. Filming on the streets of Queens and Brooklyn, and using real locations like actual police stations, courtrooms, the Balestrero home and the nightclub where Manny performed, Hitchcock tried to make The Wrong Man look and feel more like a documentary than the thrillers for which he was famous.

The result met with a lukewarm reception, but The Wrong Man has steadily gained in stature, even as the criminal procedures that ensnared Manny Balestrero have been replaced by alternate methods (though whether they provide any real protection against mistakes remains a subject of debate). Hitchcock may have wanted The Wrong Man to seem life-like, but that didn't prevent him from storyboarding every shot and pre-planning every cut. It could be argued that The Wrong Man features Hitchcock's style in its purest form, freed from such technical stunts as the continuous takes of Rope or the limited perspective of Rear Window. Instead, the director depicts the collapse of Manny Balestrero's world through subtly disorienting camera angles, unsettling editing rhythms and the expressive face of Henry Fonda in the lead role.

The Warner Archive Collection ("WAC") is releasing The Wrong Man on Blu-ray with a new transfer and WAC's usual care in mastering. Attentive fans of WAC's Blu-rays will notice something new with this disc, which includes chapter stops, multiple spoken and subtitle tracks and a main menu that uses the standard design found on Blu-ray discs from Warner Home Video. These user-friendly modifications, taken together with the announcement of six new Archive titles in just the first two months of 2016, reflect WAC's growing influence in the release of Warner's classics catalog on Blu-ray.

Although Hitchcock reportedly shot his usual cameo for The Wrong Man, he cut it from the final product as a distraction. Instead, the director appears in a silhouetted prologue, in which he informs the viewer that the film's story is true. (The introduction anticipates the format of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which would debut on CBS just two years later.) We then meet Manny Balestrero (Fonda) playing bass with the house band at The Stork Club, where owner Sherman Billingsley has a cameo as himself. With deft simplicity, Hitchcock sketches Manny's circumstances: a quiet family man with a wife, Rose (Vera Miles), two young sons and a life precariously balanced on the next paycheck. The immediate concern is that Rose needs major dental work, which will cost $300 that Manny doesn't have. Over sixty years later, the numbers may have changed, but the underlying dilemma remains a common concern.

Manny's attempt to raise the money by borrowing against Rose's insurance policy leads to his false identification by three eyewitnesses as the man who twice robbed the local office of Assured Life of New York. Under current precedents, the arrest and lineup procedures are fatally flawed, but they were standard at the time. More to the point, the arresting officers are not portrayed as villains; they are simply acting on a report that happens to be wrong. If nothing else, The Wrong Man is a primer on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

As Manny's extended family rallies around him, and even his employer has enough faith to keep him on at the club, The Wrong Man logs the many obstacles that block an innocent man's path to exoneration. It may be the law, as Manny's attorney (Anthony Quayle) tells the jury, that a defendant is presumed innocent and doesn't have to prove anything. In practice, though, the burden falls entirely on the Balestreros to develop exculpatory evidence. Unlike the innocents represented by Perry Mason on TV, Manny cannot rely on the services of a resourceful private detective, which is why he and Rose must travel upstate in search of witnesses who can vouch for Manny's alibi. At trial, he is faced with the prosecution's parade of terrified but sincere insurance employees, who identify him from the witness stand. He also has to face jurors who, despite their oath, assume that someone arrested by the police and brought to trial must have done something wrong.

But over and above the paranoia in which Hitchcock systematically envelops Manny, the director's skill as a visual dramatist is evident in The Wrong Man's depiction of the Balestrero family's disintegration. As the threat of Manny's incarceration weighs on Rose, compounded by a sense of guilt for being the immediate occasion of Manny's fateful visit to the insurance company, she gradually withdraws into a dark interior world. Vera Miles's portrayal demonstrates why Hitchcock so badly wanted her to play the doomed Madelyn Elster in his next picture, Vertigo, which Miles ultimately declined due to pregnancy. As Miles's Rose transforms before her husband's eyes, The Wrong Man shows how easily an ordinary life can become a waking nightmare, which is a recurrent theme in Hitchcock's fictional thrillers.

The real Manny Balestrero was ultimately absolved, and so is Hitchcock's protagonist, but The Wrong Man concludes on a note that is subdued rather than triumphant. Hitchcock, who famously feared policemen, leaves the viewer with a sense of how easily an innocent person can become trapped in the routine mechanics of law enforcement. The Wrong Man makes a convincing case for observing the procedural "technicalities" that have so often been the object of scorn and frustration. Had those procedures been observed, they might have prevented Manny Balestrero's ordeal.

The Wrong Man Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Wrong Man was shot by Hitchcock's regular collaborator Robert Burk (Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo and many others). For the Warner Archive Collection's Blu- ray release, a new transfer was created by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging by scanning a fine grain master positive at 2k. Substantial cleanup removed and repaired flaws in the source, but MPI has taken care to maintain the film's somewhat grainy appearance, which was a deliberate choice by Hitchcock and Burk in their pursuit of documentary realism. WAC's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray features a faithful reproduction of the film's grain structure with superior resolution of fine detail. Black levels are accurate, and whites and shades of gray are precisely delineated, allowing a full appreciation of Hitchcock's deliberate balancing of light and dark areas of the frame, as if two forces were battling for supremacy. The faces of Henry Fonda and Vera Miles, whose features Hitchcock repeatedly invites us to study closely, can be observed in tiny detail, as can the crowd at The Stork Club, the particulars of the courtroom, and numerous other locales, both real and artificial.

WAC has mastered The Wrong Man at a typically high bitrate of 32.91 Mbps, ensuring a first-rate encode. The days of low bitrates on Warner catalog titles are definitely over.

The Wrong Man Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Wrong Man's original mono soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels, and the quality is impressive. Manny Balestrero's bass-playing registers forcefully with deep extension into the lower ranges, and Hitchcock's typically careful selection of sound effects takes advantage of the same dynamic. Voices are clearly reproduced, including voices off-camera in several crucial scenes. The legendary Bernard Hermann provided one of his most restrained scores, with a jazz influence suggested by Manny's occupation. Hermann may be best remembered for lush orchestrations like those in Vertigo, but The Wrong Man demonstrates that he knew how to be a minimalist when the story required.

The Wrong Man Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man (480i; 1.33:1; 20:19): This informative documentary by Laurent Bouzereau gathers comments from several recognized Hitchcock experts, including director Peter Bogdanovich, TCM's Robert Osborne and film historian Richard Schickel. Production designer Paul Sylbert provides valuable insight into the making of the film.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p 1.66:1, enhanced; 2:35): The trailer is narrated by Hitchcock in an extended version of the film's prologue. "What twist of fate could take the quiet soul of a simple man and wring it into a shape like this?"

The Wrong Man Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Wrong Man reminds us that an essential function of law enforcement is to sift good information from bad, genuine evidence from mistake, fact from misinterpretation and false memory. Despite his well-documented fear of the police, Hitchcock does not make them the enemy. Indeed, an alert police detective plays an essential role in Manny Balestrero's eventual release. Still, with mistakes by law enforcement once again becoming a topic of public debate, The Wrong Man feels strangely relevant today, even though most of us can recite Miranda warnings from memory after hearing them countless times on TV. WAC's treatment is faithful and compelling. Highly recommended.