The Wrong Man

The Wrong Man (1956) is Alfred Hitchcock's true-crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. A quiet New York musician is mistaken for a holdup man, and someone else's crime tears his whole life open.

Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) plays bass at the Stork Club, scrapes by week to week, and walks into an insurance office to borrow against his wife's policy for dental work. The clerks think he is the man who robbed them weeks earlier. A lineup, fingerprints, a cell, and the harder Manny insists on his innocence, the tighter the case closes around him. His wife Rose (Vera Miles) cannot absorb the strain and starts slipping away from reality.

Hitchcock shot this one nothing like his glossy thrillers. He worked almost as a documentarian, following the actual 1953 court record of Christopher Balestrero, and steps in front of the camera himself to warn the audience that every bit of it really happened. Robert Burks' cold black-and-white photography turns ordinary rooms into traps. Stream The Wrong Man (1956) online on iFILM.