The Only Hitchcock Movie Based on a True Crime Story Comes as Steven Spielberg's Personal Choice

Summary:

• Almost 70 years ago, Hitchcock made an underrated movie based on the true story of an innocent man charged with a crime.
• It blended documentary style and the depiction of the character’s inner conflicts.
• This movie is said to inspire Martin Scorsese 's Taxi Driver.

The filmography of Alfred Hitchcock is obviously full of movies following the wrongly accused men on the run, including The Trouble with Harry (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and Frenzy (1972). The Master of Suspense plays with this motif artfully, creating a sense of unease and misunderstanding of whether his heroes are really so innocent.

However, one of Hitchcock’s movies exploring the same theme stands out among all of them, as it was drawn from the real-life story, described in the book The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero by Maxwell Anderson. Apart from that, it’s worth a watch because it was picked by Steven Spielberg, the giant of the cinema industry.

The film’s plot centers on a musician finding himself in trouble of being unable to help his wife pay for her dental procedure. He tries to borrow money from their insurance firm, but gets mistakenly caught by the police as a man guilty of robbery.

Struggling to prove he has an alibi for the crime, the protagonist fails to go through the stress caused by the case, and it becomes an obstacle threatening to ruin his family.

Speaking of this movie, Spielberg recalls the story about Hitchcock’s father, who once took the future filmmaker to the policemen and asked them to lock him up in a cell for a while.

“I think this [film] is a result of this childhood trauma, directly,” he says.

Indeed, this work feels deeply personal and contains the highest level of seriousness ever delivered in Hitchcock’s movies. Shot in documentary style, it blends the limits of the fictional world with reality and ensures the viewers’ complete immersion in it.

The additional cultural value of this film is that it has been numerously cited as an influence on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. They both mix the events of the real world with the script, the inner state of the protagonist and the facts of his reality on screen.

Titled The Wrong Man, this 1956 movie appears to be a must-watch not only for the fans of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces and of Taxi Driver, but for all cinema lovers. Check it out, as it’s available for streaming on Prime Video .

Source: Indie Wire