The Wrong Man

One night in l953, Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a bass player at Manhattan's Stork Club, was walking home when he was accosted by two policemen. The detectives presented Balestrero to several witnesses who identified him as an armed robber, and soon the hapless musician found himself behind bars. Despite his protests of innocence, he stood trial; though the proceeding resulted in a mistrial, his life became a shambles and his wife snapped under the pressure, eventually being committed to a mental hospital. The police did find the criminal before Balestrero's new trial could open, and he was set free, but not before having been put through the machinery of New York's jail and legal system. Manny Balestrero's story caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock after reading a Life Magazine article, and it immediately appealed to the director. Hitchcock sought out playwright Maxwell Anderson, on the strength of his stage version of The Bad Seed, but the screenplay that Anderson turned in had an oddly detached quality that was at odds with what Hitch was looking for. The director then turned to screenwriter Angus McPhail to fix the various problems with Anderson's script. The two proceeded to visit all the locations of the story and the real Balestrero's life. In keeping with Hitchcock's scrupulous attention to detail and verisimilitude, the director sought out the Balestrero family's summer resort in upstate New York, and even Ossinning's Greenmont Sanitorium, where the... more

Before the opening credits, producer-director Alfred Hitchcock, appearing onscreen in silhouette, introduces the film as being a different kind of suspense story than he had made in the past because it is true, adding that "elements are stranger than the fiction he made before." Shots of the Stork Club in New York City are then shown under a written prologue: "The early morning hours of January the fourteenth, nineteen hundred and fifty-three, a day in the life of Christopher Emanuel Balestrero that he will never forget..." During the opening credits, the following acknowledgment appears between the writers' credits and the rest of the crew credits: "This picture made with the cooperation of The Department of Commerce and Public Events, City of New York."
       After the film the following epilogue appears: "Two years later, Rose Balestrero walked out of the sanitarium completely cured. Today she lives happily in Florida wi... more