1956: The Wrong Man

Not only dealing with someone wrongly accused of a crime, but even called The Wrong Man, the 1956 film starring Henry Fonda might sound like the quintessential Hitchcock movie. But it is not; there are no McGuffins, no showdowns in famous places, no breathtaking blondes and there is next to no suspense. Rather, it is a small, nitty-gritty b/w film shot almost entirely in closed spaces and led one blogger to speculate that Hitchcock may have been influenced by Italian neorealism. Also, it is no stretch to read the film an indictment of the workings of the 1950s US criminal justice system. All in all, it is pretty much the antithesis of Hitchcock's previous offering, the Technicolor blockbuster that was The Man Who Knew Too Much, and accordingly tanked at the box office. Though nicely noir in aesthetic terms, the movie suffers a bit from the story's predictability. (7.5)