I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” starring Henry Fonda for the first time last night.
To briefly synopsize the plot, Fonda plays a husband and father in NYC who goes to an insurance agency and is misidentified by workers there as the person who held them up months earlier, a person wanted for a string of hold-ups.
The police take Fonda in for questioning, and he’s very cooperative – he’s a nice guy, and he’s done nothing wrong. But it all goes wrong for him; circumstantial evidence points to him, witnesses who could have helped exonerate him died or can’t be found.
The movie for its day (early 1950s) does a good job showing the stress and hardship the justice system puts on a person and their family as they go through a meat-grinder to restore their freedom.
During this ordeal, the pressure becomes too much for Fonda’s wife, and she has a breakdown and is institutionalized – more of a peaceful convalescence home than those scary old mental institutions you think of from the past.
Ultimately, the police get the real robber, the employees who fingered Fonda realize they made a mistake, and Fonda’s freed. But when he tells his wife the good news, it doesn’t change her psychological state. The damage is done, and she has no interest in returning home to him and the kids.
It’s a dark, noir-ish movie with a powerful but decidedly downer ending.
Except …
Hitchcock at the very last cuts to a sunny street scene with palm trees, and words come up on the screen telling us (paraphrasing) “But two years later, the wife was completely cured. The entire family lives happily together now in Florida. But they never forget their nightmare ordeal.”
Are you kidding me?
What a cop-out!
You’ve made a dark, gritty movie throughout and you pull the punch at the last?
If Hitchcock was worried about audience reaction to such a downbeat ending, did he really thick that tack-on narrative makes it all better?
It seemed out of place with the rest of the movie, perhaps a studio-mandated add-on.