THE WRONG MAN

 Perhaps because it isn't a conventional suspense picture or perhaps because it's just so downbeat Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" isn't much revived and yet it's one of his greatest films. It's the story of 'Manny' Balestrero, a totally innocent New Yorker identified by several people as an armed robber. If it were fiction we would call it Kafkaesque but this is fact. Balestrero's reactions as to what's  happening to him are as blank and unresponsive as Joseph K's and Henry Fonda is simply magnificent in the role, (it may be his finest performance), and as befits the seriousness of the subject matter Hitchcock films it almost as if it were a documentary, Brilliantly shot in black and white by Robert Burks and with a surprisingly muted Bernard Herrmann score this is an astonishing and deeply moving work. Absolutely essential.