Truffaut and Hitchcock: ‘The Wrong Man’

The Wrong Man (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Meeting with journalist Lillian Ross in New York when he was presenting ‘The Soft Skin’ (La peau douce) at the New York Film Festival in 1964, Truffaut discussed the book of interviews with Hitchcock that he was preparing (and that was eventually published in 1966). 

Truffaut talked about his devotion to the work of Hitchcock, whom he referred to as ‘the greatest director of films in the world... Each week for the past few years, I have been going to see at least two of his pictures. “Vertigo” I see at least every two months. … The more I see of Hitchcock’s pictures, the less desire I have to see pictures other than his.’ 

Truffaut went into considerable detail about how much he learned about filmmaking from Hitchcock, in terms of what can be described as the professional and technical aspects of filmmaking, such as:

the principle, extremely important, that an emotion must be created on the screen and then must be sustained—on the technical level as well as on the emotional level. … It is so important to sustain it, even after the character eliciting the emotion leaves the room, goes off the screen. There is so much to learn from Hitchcock—how to keep the camera on the character you want the audience to be interested in, and not cut, even when the character walks all the way across the room.

Truffaut’s engagement with and enthusiasm for Hitchcock’s work did much to establish Hitchcock as a serious cinematic artist, in contrast to the cultivated image of Hitchcock as the master of suspense with its connotations of Hitchcock as a mere technical director. 

The following extract from an early essay by Truffaut on Hitchcock’s ‘The Wrong Man’ takes Hitchcock’s thematic concerns seriously, focusing on significant obsessions of Hitchcock’s: culpability, guilt, the double, while drawing an interesting parallel with Robert Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’.

Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and of English humor. There is very little suspense in it and almost no humor, English or otherwise. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock's most stripped-down film since Lifeboat; it is the roast without the gravy, the news event served up raw and, as Bresson would say, "without adornment." Hitchcock is no fool. If The Wrong Man, his first black-and-white film since I Confess, is shot inexpensively in the street, subway, the places where the action really occurred, it's because he knew he was making a difficult and relatively less commercial film than he usually does. When it was finished, Hitchcock was undoubtedly worried, for he renounced his usual cameo in the course of the film, and instead showed us his silhouette before the title appeared to warn us that what he was offering this time was something different, a drama based on fact. 

There cannot fail to be comparisons made between The Wrong Man and Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné a Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped). It would be foolish to assume that this would work to the detriment of Hitchcock’s film, which is sufficiently impressive right from the start not to have to beg for pride of place. The comparison is no less fascinating when pushed to its utmost, to where the divergences between the two movies cast a mutual light on each other. 

The point of departure is identical: the scrupulous reconstruction of an actual event, its faithful rendering limited solely to the facts. For Bresson’s film is as far from the account of Commandant Devigny as Hitchcock’s is from the event reported in Life magazine. The reality, for both Hitchcock and for Bresson, was simply a pretext, a springboard for a second reality that is the only thing that interests them. 

Since we are discussing the elements they have in common, we should point out that, faced with an identical problem, although they were seeking different solutions, Bresson and Hitchcock coincided on more than one point. For example, the acting. Just like Leterrier in Bresson's film, Henry Fonda is impassive, expressionless, almost immobile. Fonda is only a look. If his attitude is more crushed and more humble than Bresson’s man who is condemned to death, it is because he is not a political prisoner who knows he has won to his cause half the world who thinks as he does, but an ordinary prisoner in criminal court, with all appearances against him and, as the film goes on, less and less chance of proving his innocence. Never was Fonda so fine, so grand and noble as in this film where he has only to present his honest man's face, just barely lit with a sad, an almost transparent, expression. 

Another point in common – indeed the most striking – is that Hitchcock has almost made it impossible for the spectator to identify with the drama's hero; we are limited to the role of witnesses. We are at Fonda’s side throughout, in his cell, in his home, in the car, on the street, but we are never in his place. That is an innovation in Hitchcock’s work, since the suspense of his earlier films was based precisely on identification. 

Hitchcock, the director who is most concerned about innovation, this time wants the public to experience a different kind of emotional shock, something clearly rarer than the famous shiver. One final common point: Hitchcock and Bresson have both built their films on one of those coincidences that make scrupulous screenwriters scream. Lieutenant Fontaine escapes miraculously; the stupid intervention of a hostile juror saves Henry Fonda. To this authentic miracle Hitchcock added another of his own making, and it will doubtless shock my colleagues. Fonda (in the film, he is of Italian descent and is named Balestrero) is lost. Waiting for his second trial, he cannot find any proof of his innocence. His wife is in a mental institution and his mother tells him, ‘You should pray.’ 

So Fonda kneels before a statue of Jesus Christ and prays ‘My God, only a miracle can save me.’ There is a closeup of Christ, a dissolve, and then a shot in the street that shows a man who somewhat resembles Fonda walking toward the camera until the frame catches him in a closeup with his face and Fonda’s superimposed. This is certainly the most beautiful shot in Hitchcock's work and it summarizes all of it. It is the transfer of culpability, the theme of the double, already present in his first English movies, and still present in all his later ones, improved, enriched, and deepened from film to film. With this affirmation of belief in Providence – in Hitchcock's work, too, the wind blows where it will-the similarities culminate and cease. 

With Bresson there is a dialogue between the soul and objects, the relationship of the one to others. Hitchcock is more human, obsessed as always by innocence and guilt, and truly agonized by judicial error. As a motto to The Wrong Man he could have used this pensee of Pascal's: “Truth and justice are two such subtle points that our instruments are too dull to reach them exactly. If they do reach them, they conceal the point and bear down all around, more on what is false than on what is true.” 

Hitchcock offers a film about the role of the accused man, an accused man and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with documentaries except its appearance; in its pessimism and skepticism.  

– Francois Truffaut, ‘The Wrong Man’ in ‘The Films In My Life’