Blind Justice
How Hitchcock revealed truths that the criminal justice system refused to face.
Manny Balestrero with his “lookalike,” Charles James Daniell. (Getty Images and Life magazine.)
Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men and posted with the permission of the author. The book is: © 2023, Jason Isralowitz.
THE NEWSPAPER PHOTO SUGGESTS A HOLLYWOOD ENDING: a man beams as his sons, ages twelve and five, hug him and kiss his forehead. The man, Christopher Emanuel Balestrero, had just been cleared of charges in the armed robberies of a Queens insurance office. His exoneration came in the spring of 1953, after a man of similar appearance confessed to the crimes. New York’s Daily News portrayed the guilty party as Balestrero’s “double” and used the photo to evoke a restoration of family bliss.
Except there would be no bliss for the Balestreros. The photo itself attests to a fracture in the family: Balestrero’s wife, Rose, is missing. While father and sons posed for the press in Queens, Rose remained more than thirty miles away at the Greenmont Sanitarium in Ossining. Rose had suffered a nervous breakdown after Balestrero’s arrest. She would remain institutionalized for two years.
In the Daily News photo, Rose’s continuing absence seems imprinted on the face of her older son, Robert. While little brother Greg smiles unabashedly at the camera, Robert looks haunted and sad. His expression is the face of a family riven by trauma.
This rupture in the Balestrero household lies at the heart of The Wrong Man, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film starring Henry Fonda (as Balestrero, who went by the nickname Manny) and Vera Miles (as Rose). By the time he signed onto the project, Hitchcock had made many films that featured wrongfully accused protagonists. In the director’s breakthrough hit, The 39 Steps (1935), tourist Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is framed for the murder of a woman found dead in his flat. For the rest of his career, Hitchcock returned to the theme of mistaken identity so often that it became his trademark. “I use the ‘wrong man’ theme a lot because it is something everyone can identify with easily,” he said in 1978. “Each of us has at one time or another been wrongly blamed for something we were innocent of.”
A factory worker goes on the run after police falsely accuse him of sabotage (Saboteur, 1942). A psychiatrist struggles to clear an amnesiac wanted for murder (Spellbound, 1945). A tennis pro inadvertently strikes a deal with a sociopath and comes under suspicion for the strangling of his estranged wife (Strangers on a Train, 1951). A priest faces ruin when circumstantial evidence implicates him in the murder of a lawyer who had been blackmailing the priest’s former flame (I Confess, 1953). An advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent and then framed for the murder of a United Nations ambassador (North by Northwest, 1959). An unemployed bartender whose ex-wife is murdered becomes the chief suspect in the hunt for a serial killer (Frenzy, 1972). All these films use misidentification and false accusation to drive their plots.
While fueled by the same narrative engine, The Wrong Man marked a detour for Hitchcock. Here he set out to tell a true story, crafted by screenwriters who drew from extensive field research and a trial transcript. The director chose not to embellish the story with the plot twists and set pieces that marked his ascendance in Hollywood. Instead, he aimed for documentary-style accuracy. “For the sake of authenticity everything was minutely reconstructed with the people who were actually involved in that drama,” Hitchcock later told filmmaker François Truffaut in an interview for Truffaut’s landmark book on the director. To that end, Hitchcock filmed many scenes on location in Manhattan, where Manny worked, and in Queens, where he lived. Shooting locations included the Queens County Courthouse, the 110th Precinct, local delis and liquor stores, and the New York City subway.
In an early scene, Manny descends into the subway station at East Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. A screeching Queens-bound E train barrels into the station alongside him, foreshadowing the powerful and impersonal forces that will soon bear down on him.
Hitchcock’s use of these city landmarks gives the film a time capsule quality; it allows us to walk the streets, and tour the corridors of justice, of 1950s New York. But what distinguished the film from other crime dramas of its era—and brought it closer to social realism than anything else in Hitchcock’s canon—was the decision to tell the story exclusively from Manny’s perspective. As the director told the New York Times, Hollywood had to that point failed to present false arrest “from the point of view of the person who underwent this ordeal.” Instead, most films relegated victims of wrongful arrests to supporting roles while centering their narratives on a crusading lawyer, cop, or journalist. Hitchcock cited two examples of this prevailing approach. The first, Call Northside 777 (1948), starred James Stewart as a reporter chasing leads all over Chicago to reopen a case involving the murder of a police officer. The second, Boomerang! (1947), cast Dana Andrews as a noble prosecutor who restages the shooting of a priest to disprove the state’s own theory of the crime. In both films, innocent men languish in confinement, mostly off-screen, awaiting salvation.
In The Wrong Man, by contrast, we stay with the Balestreros as they are buffeted by fate without the protection of a heroic lawyer or investigator. Criminologist Nicole Rafter has pointed out that the absence of a “justice figure” sets Hitchcock’s film apart from most courtroom dramas, which include “a hero who tries to move man-made law ever closer to the ideal until it matches the justice template.” As Rafter observed, The Wrong Man has no obvious villain either. Insurance company employees misidentify Manny, but their accusations are well-intentioned, even if tainted by fear. The detectives who arrest Manny fail to conduct a proper investigation, but that failure is not rooted in malice or personal profit.
And so The Wrong Man has no conventional heroes or villains, no action sequences, and no Perry Mason moments of courtroom drama. The absence of these elements may explain the film’s relative obscurity among Hitchcock’s works. It certainly contributed to a poor showing at the box office. The film made only $1.2 million domestically—well below the $4.4 million haul for Hitchcock’s other 1956 release, The Man Who Knew Too Much. These results pointed to disappointed expectations. “Every moment an eternity of suspense,” the Warner Bros. trailer promised. But audiences primed for the Hitchcock brand found something else entirely: a spare, dark account of working-class lives upended by false arrest.
Publicity still for The Wrong Man. (Warner Brothers)
Some critics seemed similarly caught off guard. In the headline for its Christmas Eve 1956 review, the New York Times declared that “Suspense Is Dropped in ‘The Wrong Man.’” Critic A. H. Weiler praised Hitchcock for doing “a fine and lucid job with the facts,” but found only a “modicum of drama” in the film. In Weiler’s view, Hitchcock had delivered a “somber case history” depicting events that “rarely stir the emotions or make a viewer’s spine tingle.” The Los Angeles Times similarly praised the “integrity” of the film, but warned that “it is a downbeat, depressing experience” that “proves again that life can be more interminable than fiction.” Time magazine complained that Hitchcock’s “completely literal rendering” drained the story of emotion and that “by sticking to the facts, he missed the truth.”
Even Hitchcock later second-guessed his approach. He fretted over the decision to interrupt the story of Manny’s experience in the justice system with scenes of Rose’s mental collapse. “It’s possible I was too concerned with veracity to take sufficient dramatic license,” Hitchcock said. Yet in other interviews Hitchcock expressed regret over scenes that deviated from the facts of the case, referring to them as a “mistake.” Overall, when pressed by Truffaut to defend the film, Hitchcock claimed that “I don’t feel that strongly about it.”
Whether because of critical misgivings, poor box office, or Hitchcock’s own ambivalence, The Wrong Man has drawn little attention compared with the director’s other films. The New York Times, for example, failed to mention the film in its very long obituaries for Hitchcock and Fonda upon their deaths in 1980 and 1982, respectively. And unlike eighteen other Hitchcock classics, it is not among The Essential 1,000 Films to See according to the Times.
In recent years, however, The Wrong Man has grown in reputation. It airs periodically on Turner Classic Movies, where host Ben Mankiewicz has introduced it as “a different kind of Hitchcock thriller, though still one with a tense and gripping story.” Film historians David Thomson and Richard Schickel argued that the film was unfairly dismissed upon its release. Culture writer Glenn Kenny admires its fluent cinematic style and “terrifying attention to detail,” while critic Scott Tobias sees it as “an overlooked masterpiece from [Hitchcock’s] greatest decade.” In 2015, the popular Filmspotting podcast devoted an episode to the film after identifying it as a “blind spot” in the Hitchcock canon, with hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen praising its artistry and performances.
The Wrong Man’s biggest champion is director Martin Scorsese, who has cited the film’s camerawork and mood as a major influence on his 1976 classic, Taxi Driver. Scorsese has watched The Wrong Man “over and over again” across the years. He has singled out “the sense of guilt and paranoia” in sequences where Manny is paraded as a suspect before eyewitnesses. In 2020, in a short film documenting his experience during the pandemic for the BBC Two series Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard, Scorsese included scenes of Manny’s imprisonment to evoke his feelings of isolation and dread in quarantine. “At first there was a day or so of a kind of relief . . . and then—the anxiety set in,” Scorsese says, before cutting to a shot of jail cell doors closing behind Manny.
Despite Scorsese’s ardor, The Wrong Man remains neglected both as a piece of pop culture and as inspiration for legal commentators. It failed to make the American Film Institute’s top-ten “courtroom dramas,” a genre that includes “any film in which a system of justice plays a critical role in the film’s narrative.” Atop that list is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), followed by another Fonda film, 12 Angry Men (1957), and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).
The Wrong Man similarly failed to make the American Bar Association’s 2018 list of the top twenty-five legal-themed films of all time. In fact, the film did not even make the ABA’s secondary list of twenty-five honorable mentions. And while law professors have written extensively on films like 12 Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, Hitchcock’s film has inspired only limited commentary from legal scholars.
Even with its low profile, The Wrong Man isn’t just artistic inspiration for filmmakers such as Scorsese. It is also one of the most important movies about criminal justice ever made. By capturing the realities of the legal system of its day, Hitchcock and his team opened a window into New York’s history of wrongful convictions. At the same time, the film highlights systemic problems that inform the modern movement for innocence reforms. It both reflects and transcends its era.
Hitchcock’s immediate subject was a single false arrest. When viewed in its historical context, however, The Wrong Man tells a larger story of how New York’s legal institutions responded to several earlier mistaken identity cases. In the most famous of these cases, Long Island resident Bertram Campbell served more than three years in prison on forgery charges, only to be pardoned in 1945 after the real culprit confessed. Today, Campbell is a footnote in American legal history. But seventy-seven years ago, his plight captured headlines across the country, with one paper labeling him “the most famous penal martyr in New York State history.” The exonerations of several other convicted defendants drew similar attention.
In vacating their convictions, New York’s courts disclaimed any finding of corruption or official abuse. “There has been a wrong done to you, but it was an honest mistake,” a judge told one exoneree. Another judge likewise assured Campbell that he had been “tried in accordance with the orderly processes of criminal proceedings” by officials who showed no “malice.” Campbell’s misfortune, the court said, “was the result of mistaken identity.” These statements embraced a narrative advanced by police and prosecutors: wrongful convictions were unavoidable tragedies arising from sincere eyewitness error.
But the record belies this narrative. As discussed in Part One of this book, these early wrongful conviction cases were marked by witness coaching, prejudicial identification procedures, and the withholding of exculpatory information. And in some cases, mistaken eyewitness testimony was not the impetus for the arrest, but the tool used to secure the conviction.
Bertram Campbell’s exoneration was a wake-up call for New York’s legal institutions. The state’s admission that it had incarcerated an innocent person was a shock to the system. Newspapers fueled a push for accountability and reform. A US Supreme Court justice called the case “disturbing.” The criminal bar association convened hearings to investigate what had gone wrong. State legislators passed a law allowing Campbell and other exonerees to sue the state for compensation.
In the most significant step of all, Governor Thomas E. Dewey—who as district attorney had prosecuted Campbell—acknowledged the need for additional safeguards against erroneous identification. In 1945, Dewey directed the Judicial Council of the State of New York to study the causes of wrongful conviction and propose corrective legislation. The council was chaired by the chief judge of New York’s highest court (the Court of Appeals) and included the presiding judges of the state’s four appellate divisions.
But after an extended study period, the council declined to recommend a change in the law. “It is not believed that the problem of erroneous identification can be eased by statute or court rule,” the council declared. Its report sidestepped any acknowledgment of official misconduct. In fact, the council failed to address the prevailing identification procedures of the day.
Had the council done so, the course of American legal history might have been different. The evidence of systemic flaws was available in trial transcripts and other records documenting what suspects experienced in police precincts. These records, which underlie the first part of this book, paint a picture of a criminal justice system blind to, and ill-equipped to deal with, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
Still, the status quo is not easily disturbed. Without a decisive mandate from the council, reformers had little hope of systemic improvements. And so the cries for change stirred by the Campbell case went unheeded. Authorities neither owned up to their failings nor adopted regulations to reduce the risk of eyewitness misidentifications. Instead, echoing the judicial assurance given to exonerees, prosecutors continued to attribute wrongful convictions to the “honest mistake” of well-meaning witnesses.
In short, while recognizing the tragedies that had befallen the innocent, the state failed to reckon with its complicity in bringing them about.
As a result, when Manny Balestrero came under suspicion for armed robbery in January 1953, eyewitness accusations threatened to seal his fate long before trial. Manny’s ordeal is examined in Part Two of this book. In his case, Queens police deployed the same suggestive procedures that contributed to earlier miscarriages of justice. And prosecutors ignored substantial evidence of his innocence. Manny ultimately avoided a conviction only after a juror’s outburst that led to a mistrial, followed by the fortuitous arrest of the guilty party for another crime.
Manny’s exoneration, in turn, produced the same narrative that came out of the earlier cases: an astonishing similarity between the accused and the real culprit had led eyewitnesses into an unlikely misidentification. Police took no responsibility for the false arrest. There were no demands for improved identification procedures and no scrutiny of the prosecution. New York’s investigative business continued as usual.
Balestrero (far right) on To Tell the Truth, January 15, 1957. (Game Show Network)
Released less than four years later, The Wrong Man is a rebuke to the state’s inaction. The film refuses to exonerate law enforcement officials for their role in mistaken identity cases. Instead, it demonstrates that authorities presumed Manny’s guilt based on the word of fallible eyewitnesses. In sequences that attest to the failure to learn from earlier tragedies, detectives subject Manny to a series of incriminating identification procedures, while the assistant district attorney, judge, and jury are impatient to close the case. Hitchcock shows us what the state was not willing to admit: the incarceration of the innocent was as much the product of institutional failings as of the frailties of eyewitness memory and observation.
The Wrong Man was ahead of its time. In the 1950s, American courts continued to invoke the assurance of a leading federal appellate judge, Learned Hand, that “the ghost of the innocent man convicted” was an “unreal dream.” Hitchcock makes the contrary case. In fact, the film’s most famous line is an ironic reformulation of Judge Hand’s premise. “An innocent man has nothing to fear,” the detectives tell Balestrero as they interrogate him. But Hitchcock explodes that cliché. His film shows how the routines of law enforcement transformed eyewitness mistakes into a miscarriage of justice.
While many films remain tethered to their era, The Wrong Man exerts an enduring power. It is neither dated nor didactic. It has no grand speeches about the presumption of innocence, due process, or police abuses. Instead, in fusing understated realism with striking visual motifs, Hitchcock employs a restraint that aligns with his aspirations of documentary authenticity. He invites us alongside the Balestreros to observe decent people struggling to maintain their bearings in a world turned upside down. By staying with their perspective, the film allows us not only to see what they endured, but also to sense what it felt like.
At the same time, The Wrong Man is prescient in exploring issues that have occupied legal commentators over the past sixty years. The issues include the need for eyewitness identification reforms, the assembly-line nature of criminal justice procedures, and the tension between prosecutors’ role as advocates and their duty to protect the innocent. The film also strikingly depicts the investigative “tunnel vision” that contributes to wrongful conviction. Legal scholars describe tunnel vision as the tendency of law enforcement agents to reach a conclusion about a suspect early on and “then filter all evidence in a case through the lens provided by that conclusion.”
These issues have animated the innocence movement that emerged in the 1990s after the advent of DNA testing. At the forefront of the movement is the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy nonprofit whose mission is to exonerate wrongfully convicted defendants. Founded in 1992 by attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, the Innocence Project reports, as of this writing, that 375 people have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing. Almost 70 percent of these cases involved erroneous eyewitness identification.
Forensic advances have thus forced a recognition that the jailing of innocents occurs far more often than jurists had previously acknowledged. As one federal appeals judge noted in 2007, “today, with the advance of forensic DNA technology, our desire to join Learned Hand’s optimism has given way to the reality of wrongful convictions . . . .”
That reality hangs over our criminal justice system more than six decades after the release of Hitchcock’s film, even as significant strides have been made in recent years. In 2020, the Queens district attorney joined the ranks of other prosecutors across the nation by establishing a conviction integrity unit. For the first time, the office that prosecuted Manny Balestrero had a team to investigate innocence claims. Within eleven months, two men who had each spent twenty-five years in prison—forty-five-year-old Samuel Brownridge and sixty-two-year-old Jaythan Kendrick—were freed based on evidence that discredited the eyewitness testimony against them. Their exonerations drew praise from reformers who saw in the Queens DA’s office a newfound willingness to admit mistakes. But their suffering reminds us of the persistence of the forces that led to the imprisonment of defendants like Bertram Campbell.
This is the story of New York’s fleeting awakening, more than seventy-five years ago, to the reality of wrongful convictions. It is the story of the falsely accused defendants whose suffering led to early cries for systemic improvements to protect the innocent. It is the story of how the state’s legal institutions squandered an opportunity for reform. And it is the story of how Hollywood’s most popular director made a work of art that reveals truths that those institutions refused to face.
