# The Wrong Man

**The Wrong Man** is a 1956 American black-and-white docudrama directed by [Alfred Hitchcock](https://www.edgepedia.org/alfred-hitchcock), starring [Henry Fonda](https://www.edgepedia.org/henry-fonda), Vera Miles, and [Anthony Quayle](https://www.edgepedia.org/anthony-quayle), based on the true case of a New York nightclub musician falsely arrested for a series of armed robberies.<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup> It was produced and distributed by Warner Bros., runs 105 minutes, and was written by Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail.<sup>[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)</sup> The film is unusual in Hitchcock's career for being drawn entirely from a factual case, and it opens with the director himself, in silhouette, telling the audience that what follows is true.<sup>[3](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WhittyStephen-2016-The-Alfred-Hitchcock-Encyclopedia.pdf)</sup>

| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director / cast | Alfred Hitchcock; Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup> |
| Release | December 22, 1956 (theatrical, Warner Bros.); 105 minutes, black and white, mono sound<sup>[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)</sup> |
| Source material | Maxwell Anderson's book *The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero* and Herbert Brean's June 1953 *Life* article "A Case of Identity"<sup>[4](https://www.royalbooks.com/pages/books/143359/alfred-hitchcock-angus-macphail-maxwell-anderson-herbert-brean-vera-miles-henry-fonda-director/the-wrong-man-original-photograph-from-the-set-of-the-1956-film)</sup> |
| True case | Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero, a Stork Club bassist, was arrested in January 1953 after being mistaken for an armed robber<sup>[5](https://www.kwsnet.com/title-summary-review.pdf)</sup> |
| Box office | $1.2 million domestically, against $4.4 million for Hitchcock's other 1956 release, *The Man Who Knew Too Much*<sup>[6](https://www.macguffin.media/hitchcockian-quarterly/issue-2/blind-justice)</sup> |
| Critical scores | 93% Tomatometer (27 reviews) and 75% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes<sup>[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)</sup> |
| Music | Bernard Herrmann's third Hitchcock score, pared down to evoke the film's jazz-club setting<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup> |

## Spoilers

### Plot and the true case

Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is a bassist at the Stork Club in New York who needs money for his wife Rose's ([Vera Miles](https://www.edgepedia.org/vera-miles)) dental work. When he tries to borrow against their insurance policy, staff at the office mistake him for a man who had robbed them twice at gunpoint. Eyewitnesses then link him to other robberies, and he is arrested. His defense attorney, [Frank O'Connor](https://www.edgepedia.org/frank-oconnor) (Anthony Quayle), works to establish an alibi, while the strain of the case pushes Rose into a dangerous depression before his name is cleared.<sup>[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup>

The film follows a case that occurred in New York City in January 1953.<sup>[5](https://www.kwsnet.com/title-summary-review.pdf)</sup> The real Balestrero was freed when the actual robber, a near dead ringer, tried to rob the same office and store again.<sup>[7](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/alfred-hitchcock-and-film-noir/wrong-man-1956-hitchcocks-contribution-to-the-noir-film-of-fact-production-cycle/398C9E44BDCC5330938F35C9CBC9E7BB)</sup> Hitchcock learned of the case through a photospread in *Life* magazine by Herbert Brean that brought Balestrero to a national readership and made the story, in the words of film historian R. Barton Palmer, a professor at [Clemson University](https://www.edgepedia.org/clemson-university), "literally ripped from the headlines" and pre-sold as a film subject.<sup>[7](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/alfred-hitchcock-and-film-noir/wrong-man-1956-hitchcocks-contribution-to-the-noir-film-of-fact-production-cycle/398C9E44BDCC5330938F35C9CBC9E7BB)</sup> In Jackson Heights, Queens, a street at the corner of 73rd Street and 41st Avenue is named "Manny 'The Wrong Man' Balestrero Way."<sup>[8](https://watchguide.net/filme/krimi/der-falsche-mann/)</sup>

## Production and style

**A deliberate departure.** *The Wrong Man* was a relatively low-budget picture Hitchcock owed Warner Brothers, shot in black and white in a sober, near-documentary register.<sup>[9](https://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Star%20Pages/Nick%20Zegarac/Articles/NZ%20Article%20-%20Hitchcock%2C%20Alfred_02.pdf)</sup> The American Film Institute describes it as Hitchcock experimenting in the neorealist style of [Roberto Rossellini](https://www.edgepedia.org/roberto-rossellini) and [Vittorio De Sica](https://www.edgepedia.org/vittorio-de-sica), which had recently impressed him.<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup> It was Henry Fonda's only film for Hitchcock.<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup>

Hitchcock dropped his usual whimsical cameo. Instead he appears at the very beginning, silhouetted on a shadowed soundstage, soberly announcing that this is a different sort of crime story and that everything the audience is about to see is true.<sup>[3](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WhittyStephen-2016-The-Alfred-Hitchcock-Encyclopedia.pdf)</sup> The film's strict adherence to factual detail, one retrospective notes, also renders it somewhat weaker than Hitchcock's classic invented plots, since in this case truth is stranger than fiction.<sup>[5](https://www.kwsnet.com/title-summary-review.pdf)</sup> Hitchcock did, however, deliberately leave out some information that pointed to Manny's innocence in order to heighten the tension.<sup>[10](https://hitchcock.tv/mov/wrong_man/man.html)</sup>

Critic Glenn Kenny, writing at RogerEbert.com, identifies a series of what [Jean-Luc Godard](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-luc-godard) called "doubled scenes," most visibly the two bedroom conversations between Manny and Rose: in the first the couple sit close together in one frame, in the second, after the arrest, they sit far apart, the staging and long shadows turning a warm marriage into an image of opposition.<sup>[11](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wrong-man-hitchcocks-least-fun-movie-is-also-one-of-his-greatest)</sup> A chapter by Noa Steimatsky in *One Shot Hitchcock* ([Oxford University Press](https://www.edgepedia.org/oxford-university-press), 2024) analyzes the film's climactic lap-dissolve superimposition, in which two shots merge into one, as a visual figure for the mistaken identity and the gap between seeing and knowing at the heart of the film.<sup>[12](https://academic.oup.com/book/56149/chapter-abstract/443252778)</sup>

Composer [Bernard Herrmann](https://www.edgepedia.org/bernard-herrmann), in his third collaboration with Hitchcock, wrote a pared-down score evoking the jazz-tinged setting.<sup>[1](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)</sup> A study of the Hitchcock-Herrmann partnership describes the music as unlike Herrmann's previous work for the director, written to intensify the cold, nightmarish story of an innocent man trapped in an unjust system.<sup>[13](https://academic.oup.com/book/60783/chapter-abstract/528599345?login=true)</sup>

## Reception and box office

The film was not a commercial success in 1956, earning $1.2 million domestically against the $4.4 million of *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, Hitchcock's other release that year; audiences primed for the Hitchcock brand found instead a spare, dark account of working-class lives upended by false arrest.<sup>[6](https://www.macguffin.media/hitchcockian-quarterly/issue-2/blind-justice)</sup> The *New York Times* ran a [Christmas Eve](https://www.edgepedia.org/christmas-eve) 1956 review under the headline "Suspense Is Dropped in 'The Wrong Man.'"<sup>[6](https://www.macguffin.media/hitchcockian-quarterly/issue-2/blind-justice)</sup>

Critical standing has since risen. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 93% among 27 critics and 75% among more than 5,000 audience ratings.<sup>[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)</sup> In their 1957 book on Hitchcock, the future directors Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol all but proclaimed *The Wrong Man* the director's supreme masterpiece, writing that "in Hitchcock's work form does not embellish content, it creates it."<sup>[11](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wrong-man-hitchcocks-least-fun-movie-is-also-one-of-his-greatest)</sup> Kenny calls it, with the possible exception of *I Confess* (1953), the least "fun" movie of Hitchcock's Hollywood period, and also one of his greatest.<sup>[11](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wrong-man-hitchcocks-least-fun-movie-is-also-one-of-his-greatest)</sup> Richard Brody, reviewing in *The New Yorker*, argued that despite the prologue's claim of difference, the film belongs, in method, tone, and theme, with Hitchcock's more celebrated works of practical mystery and elusive identity.<sup>[14](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/the-wrong-man)</sup>

## Place in Hitchcock's work

The film sits between *The Man Who Knew Too Much* (1956) and *Vertigo* (1958) in Hitchcock's filmography, a period of his most celebrated output, and has been described as a strange outlier within it.<sup>[15](https://www.screenslate.com/articles/wrong-man)</sup> Film historians have grouped it with the noir "film of fact" production cycle of the era, and R. Barton Palmer's chapter in *Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir* treats it as Hitchcock's contribution to that cycle.<sup>[7](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/alfred-hitchcock-and-film-noir/wrong-man-1956-hitchcocks-contribution-to-the-noir-film-of-fact-production-cycle/398C9E44BDCC5330938F35C9CBC9E7BB)</sup> Its themes of a quiet, law-abiding citizen forced to defend his own character have also been read against the McCarthy-era climate, in which several of Hitchcock's friends and associates had been banned or gray-listed.<sup>[3](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WhittyStephen-2016-The-Alfred-Hitchcock-Encyclopedia.pdf)</sup> The story also fits a recurring Hitchcock pattern, seen from *Saboteur* and *Shadow of a Doubt* to *Strangers on a Train*, of a hero with an inner sense of personal justice fighting to prove his innocence.<sup>[16](https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12348)</sup>

## Availability

In the United States the film streams on Max, and can be rented for $3.99 or bought digitally on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home; it is also sold on DVD and Blu-ray.<sup>[17](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-wrong-man)</sup> Availability varies by country: it is not on a subscription service in the United Kingdom or Canada, though it streams in other markets including Spain (Prime Video).<sup>[18](https://www.flickfinder.net/movie/the-wrong-man-1956-22527)</sup>

## References

1. [The Wrong Man (1956), AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center](https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100003574/)
2. [The Wrong Man, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1024191-wrong_man)
3. [Stephen Whitty (2016). The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WhittyStephen-2016-The-Alfred-Hitchcock-Encyclopedia.pdf)
4. [The Wrong Man, original set photograph, Royal Books](https://www.royalbooks.com/pages/books/143359/alfred-hitchcock-angus-macphail-maxwell-anderson-herbert-brean-vera-miles-henry-fonda-director/the-wrong-man-original-photograph-from-the-set-of-the-1956-film)
5. [KWSnet title summary and review of The Wrong Man](https://www.kwsnet.com/title-summary-review.pdf)
6. [Blind Justice, MacGuffin Media, Hitchcockian Quarterly issue 2](https://www.macguffin.media/hitchcockian-quarterly/issue-2/blind-justice)
7. [R. Barton Palmer, "The Wrong Man (1956): Hitchcock's Contribution to the Noir 'Film of Fact' Production Cycle," in Alfred Hitchcock and Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/alfred-hitchcock-and-film-noir/wrong-man-1956-hitchcocks-contribution-to-the-noir-film-of-fact-production-cycle/398C9E44BDCC5330938F35C9CBC9E7BB)
8. [Der falsche Mann (1956), Watchguide](https://watchguide.net/filme/krimi/der-falsche-mann/)
9. [Nick Zegarac, article on Alfred Hitchcock, Doctor Macro](https://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Star%20Pages/Nick%20Zegarac/Articles/NZ%20Article%20-%20Hitchcock%2C%20Alfred_02.pdf)
10. [The Wrong Man (1956), hitchcock.tv](https://hitchcock.tv/mov/wrong_man/man.html)
11. [Glenn Kenny (2016). "The Wrong Man: Hitchcock's Least 'Fun' Movie Is Also One of His Greatest," RogerEbert.com](https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wrong-man-hitchcocks-least-fun-movie-is-also-one-of-his-greatest)
12. [Noa Steimatsky, "The Wrong Man (1956): Towards singularity," in One Shot Hitchcock, Oxford University Press, 2024](https://academic.oup.com/book/56149/chapter-abstract/443252778)
13. ["Wronged Men," in Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema, Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/book/60783/chapter-abstract/528599345?login=true)
14. [Richard Brody (2011). "The Wrong Man," The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/the-wrong-man)
15. [The Wrong Man, Screen Slate](https://www.screenslate.com/articles/wrong-man)
16. [Review of The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, European Journal of American Studies](https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12348)
17. [The Wrong Man streaming, JustWatch](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-wrong-man)
18. [Where to watch The Wrong Man (1956), FlickFinder](https://www.flickfinder.net/movie/the-wrong-man-1956-22527)

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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1940 to 1975*

*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*

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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license