Alfred Hitchcock (102 page)

On the other hand, a number of incidental figures in the case offered their assistance, and Hitchcock even hired some to portray themselves in the film. (This was a common practice of Italian neorealism, engaging nonprofessionals; but Hitchcock had rarely done it to such an extent.) Wherever possible, Hitchcock then staged their scenes in the actual locales.

Everything, Hitchcock insisted, ought to happen just as it had happened to the real Manny Balestrero. By phone and letter, Hitchcock kept Anderson abreast of the ongoing research as the latter wrote in Connecticut. When Anderson placed the scene where Manny is booked and fingerprinted too early in the script, Hitchcock gently reminded the writer of “the actual order of events.” When Anderson wrote a speech in which a juror interrupted the proceedings to admit he has reached a guilty conclusion before hearing all the evidence, Hitchcock praised Anderson’s writing, but said he couldn’t use the speech in the film. Anderson had taken too much license, and the speech as written was fictitious—“a major contradiction of the actual events, and could be so easily used in hostile criticism.”

Whenever the team hit a dry spell, they returned to the actual people, reinterviewing them for new ideas. They were amused to learn, for example, that when the real holdup man was arrested, he cried out, “Let me go!
My wife and kids are waiting for me.” Hitchcock told Anderson to drop that line into his working draft. “I loved that line,” he told François Truffaut, “it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t dream of writing into a scenario.”
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In the somber prologue he substituted for his usual cameo, Hitchcock would claim proudly (though with exaggeration) that “every word” of the script was drawn from real life.
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The leads were locked in from the start.
The Wrong Man
was tailored for Henry Fonda and Vera Miles, two additional reasons for Hitchcock to be excited about the project. He had coveted Fonda since coming to Hollywood, trying to hire him first for
Foreign Correspondent
and later for
Saboteur.
Along with Gary Cooper and James Stewart, Fonda was one of the great John Does of the American cinema, and might be expected to bring echoes of Tom Joad to his portrayal of Manny Balestrero.

The Wrong Man
would also launch Hitchcock’s “first personal star.” The phrase, used in Hitchcock’s publicity, wasn’t strictly accurate: Hitchcock had signed actresses to exclusive contracts as early as the silent era. Nor could he claim to have “discovered” Miles, for others had spotted and used her first. But until the 1950s, with Paramount’s backing and the power of a network television series under his belt, he hadn’t been in a position to have Hollywood actresses under contract. Miles was the first American he tried to build into a major star. “The latest in a famous line of cool [Hitchcock] beauties,”
McCall’s
called the actress, pointedly noting that she was being touted as “the new Grace Kelly.”

Miles may have been beautiful, but she wasn’t as well-bred as Kelly, and Edith Head was brought in to consult on her look and wardrobe for public appearances. “She’s an extraordinarily good actress,” Hitchcock advised the costume designer, “but she doesn’t dress in a way that gives her the distinction her acting warrants.” Miles wore “too much color,” Hitchcock observed, yet she was obviously the kind of person who was “swamped” by color. The decision to shoot
The Wrong Man
in black and white was in line with Italian neorealism, but was also reinforced by the director’s opinion that bright colors put Miles at a disadvantage. Head organized her “complete personal wardrobe” of blacks, whites, and grays, and then, when Miles arrived in New York in March, the first thing she
did was follow the Hitchcocks to a department store, where they picked out the kind of dresses her character should wear.

The shell-shocked woman Miles portrayed in the series premiere of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
was a kind of rough sketch for Rose, Manny’s traumatized wife; especially after Manny’s jailing, Hitchcock wanted to switch the film’s focus to Rose’s fragile psychology. As it turned out, Manny presented disappointingly few complexities to the scriptwriters, so it was all the more vital to build up the character being played by Hitchcock’s first personal star. In both cases, it proved difficult to be cinematic while remaining true to events.

The pivotal scene was Manny’s second visit with his attorney, where both he and his lawyer realize Rose is undergoing a breakdown. Hitchcock kept in touch with the real-life Balestreros in Florida, where they had moved after Rose was placed in a sanatorium.
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For this and other scenes the team communicated repeatedly with the couple, asking how Rose remembered feeling, but they were consistently discouraged by the couple’s responses. The Balestreros had only mild anecdotes. Far from flooding him with intriguing details, reality let Hitchcock down.

Hitchcock had spent his entire career creating drama out of his imagination, sprinkling fiction with bits of reality; now he strained to replicate a rigorous reality, without the slightest concession to fantasy. Again and again, the team’s research showed that the couple had endured everything with a surprising lack of “any particular emotion,” in Hitchcock’s words. The director agonized over a script that seemed doomed to end up “underwritten,” alternating many “slow passages” that echoed the reality with more satisfying scenes that seemed, to Hitchcock, “over-cinematic.” Again and again the director appealed to the Balestreros for tidbits; again and again he returned empty-handed, and wrestled with the urge to enhance the scenes—to improve reality.

Angus MacPhail made a solid contribution to the script, and would stay at the director’s side throughout the filming. Hitchcock borrowed his key team from Paramount: Herbert Coleman (associate producer), Bernard Herrmann (music), George Tomasini (editor), and Robert Burks (photography). Telling Burks he intended to shoot the film in black and white for a journalistic look, Hitchcock warned the cameraman that
The Wrong Man
might not be his kind of subject. But Burks stayed on, and once again
Hitchcock benefited from his expressive camera work. Burks switched effortlessly, making “this film of winter,” in the words of Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, a tonal companion piece to
I Confess.

The weather was wintry indeed that spring in New York. Warner’s insisted on developing the footage in California, so dailies were delayed—and refilming was thus minimized, just as the studio intended. When the actor playing the judge couldn’t remember his lines, he was hurriedly replaced; when the actress portraying the attorney’s wife gave Hitchcock “attitude,” according to Harold J. Stone, who was playing the arresting officer, she was simply cut out of the film. (The attorney’s wife is heard only on the telephone, taking a message for Anthony Quayle.)

Regardless of the weather, script deficiences, or the failings of bit players, Hitchcock was upbeat. He had long since learned to accept a film’s imperfections. Feeling right at home in his favorite New York hotels and restaurants, the director delighted in his two stars. “Didn’t he feel that actors were cattle?”
Playboy
asked Henry Fonda some years later. “Not Hitch, no,” Fonda answered. “He was funny all the time. Hitch would come in and tell a funny story just before he’d say ‘Roll ‘em’ into a serious scene. I loved working with Hitch. He blueprinted every scene he did carefully with the production man and the assistant director and the script supervisor, so that any one of the four of them could have lined up the shot and shot it.”

The man playing Manny Balestrero glided through the film, giving a sensitive, thoughtful performance—while the director bore down on the actress playing his wife. Donald Spoto writes that Hitchcock put his first personal star through “the poignant scenes of her breakdown over and over until she was nearly sick with exhaustion.” But exhaustion was part and parcel of the role, and the same process had worked wonders with, say, Joan Fontaine.

Spoto also writes that behind the scenes, Hitchcock behaved in “strangely ardent” fashion toward his leading lady—attention Spoto says she resented. (Miles herself is not quoted.) There is no question that Hitchcock took a kind of Pygmalion approach, often his technique with actresses he regarded as under his tutelage; no question, too, that Hitchcock sometimes bestowed gifts and flowers on his lead actresses, courting them with the gestures of a lover—all the better that they might respond to the ardent gaze of his lens. And no question that he stood around, waiting and watching with his penetrating gaze.

But Hitchcock was always aboveboard with Miles, associate producer Herbert Coleman insisted in an interview for this book. The director was flirtatious with beautiful actresses, he remembers, and the vivacious Miles flirted with lots of people, Hitchcock included—a give-and-take that might have been misunderstood by outsiders. “Hitch had an obsession with her,
sure,” said Coleman. “But it never went beyond imagining. Anyone would want to be a lover of Vera Miles.”

Miles was a free spirit, and to some extent she resisted Hitchcock’s hovering attention, his Svengali makeovers. Her resistance did lead to friction between them. But in
The Wrong Man
, under his strict guidance, Miles also gave a haunting performance.

And pretending to be a Cyrano in love with his leading lady may have been the only fun on a film that was saddled with bare facts and sketchy characterizations. Rose Balestrero and the other characters could have used some of the old Hitchcockery, but the neorealist mantle proved something of a straitjacket for the director. Although the French rank
The Wrong Man
among his neglected, underrated works, and the film makes an eloquent plea for the rights of the ordinary accused (indeed, it prefigures the Miranda ruling), ultimately its impact was dampened by the neo-realistic approach. Slow, somber, remarkably restrained, it’s one Hitchcock film that doesn’t hold up very well for modern audiences, to whom Manny’s ordeal can seem almost mundane.

When François Truffaut asked him about
The Wrong Man
, Hitchcock declared that it ought to be filed under “the indifferent Hitchcocks.” Fidelity to fact hurt the script; everything was “anticlimactic.” Truffaut liked it better than the director did, and he asked Hitchcock to defend the film. “Impossible,” Hitchcock replied. “I don’t feel that strongly about it.”

One part of the film he did feel strongly about was the scene toward the end, after Rose has been institutionalized and Manny, facing retrial, has begun to lose hope. His mother urges him to pray to God for strength and deliverance. (All along Manny has carried rosary beads in his pocket.) As Manny (and the audience) stare at a picture of the Savior, and his lips murmur in prayer, a double exposure reveals the real killer walking down a street; his face gradually fills the same frame until it is superimposed over Manny’s close-up. More than once in interviews Hitchcock apologized for this violation of reality, but just as often he admitted that it was one aspect of
The Wrong Man
that for some reason he liked. The one thing he liked was a cinematic intrusion that violated neorealism—a moment that provided a moving reaffirmation of his faith that, in a just world, God wouldn’t condemn a wrong man.

Preparing to leave the world of New York realism behind for something far more exotic, the Hitchcocks received yellow fever shots on May 18, 1956. After the premiere of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
on May 22, the director left George Tomasini behind to edit
The Wrong Man
and Bernard Herrmann to work on the music, and joined his wife, Herbert Coleman, and Doc Ericksen on a flight to London. From there they flew
to Swaziland, Rhodesia, and the Republic of South Africa to scout locations for
Flamingo Feather.

Flamingo Feather
was an almost conventional adventure story written by the unconventional Laurens Van der Post, the leading South African novelist, travel writer, and memoirist, better known for more elegiac explorations of the beauty and mystery of Africa past and present. Van der Post’s novel shared an anti-Communist angle with several other Hitchcock projects of the 1950s, with a white South African anthropologist foiling a Communist conspiracy to foment a rebellion of jungle natives.

James Stewart had agreed to star in
Flamingo Feather
, and the filming had been announced for the late fall or winter, in Africa. Again Hitchcock hoped to reunite Stewart with Grace Kelly, though as Princess Grace of Monaco she had temporarily retired from acting.

When the small advance party arrived at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg in the first week of July, Hitchcock told reporters he was visiting “for atmosphere, just atmosphere.” He expected to make a three-week tour of possible sites, but also to meet with Van der Post. Paramount was eager to avoid stirring up political controversy, so Hitchcock downplayed the novel’s anti-Communist slant, describing instead “a sort of John Buchan real adventure, with good, sophisticated stars.” He laid out his plans to build up the romance (nonexistent in the book) and disguise the Communists, perhaps transforming them into agitators with faux dialects. “Politics is bad box office anywhere,” Hitchcock told the
Cape Times.
“Love, yes. Van der Post agrees with me that there should be a stronger love interest.”

The director still had close relatives in South Africa, and that undoubtedly was part of the appeal of the project and the trip. He stopped off in Durban to catch up on old times with his father’s sister, Emma Rhodes—always known in the family, because she had the same name as Hitchcock’s mother, as the “South African Emma.”

The sightseeing and reunion with his aunt led Donald Spoto to describe the trip as a studio-paid holiday, “which is very likely what Hitchcock wanted all along.” Doc Ericksen thought the trip was some kind of “scam,” but Herbert Coleman scoffed at that word, saying they conducted earnest preproduction in South Africa. Hitchcock could well afford to travel at his own expense, Coleman points out, and often did.