Alfred Hitchcock, George Rouault and the Curious Case of The Wrong Man

“It’s nothing for an innocent man to worry about. It’s the fella that’s done something wrong that has to worry.” So say the police who spend the night interrogating Manny Balastrero. He finds that advice to be cold comfort as the jail doors clang shut behind him, an innocent man if there ever was one.

For years, critics and biographers glommed onto Alfred Hitchcock’s strict Jesuit education as a key to understanding his films. His favorite themes of crime and punishment, guilt and innocence were all imprinted on him at the end of those priests’ punishing leather strops. Then the tide turned. Today, most writers soft-pedal the influence that religion may have had on his work. (As an adult, he rarely went to church, and at times expressed an ambivalent view of religion in general.) Curiously, two of his films that explicitly dive into Catholic themes—I Confess (1953) and The Wrong Man (1956)—are largely overlooked—at least at the film festival level. In the spirit of what-goes-around-comes-around, I’d like to approach that second film from a more nuanced perspective. It ain’t hard to draw a connection between Hitch’s equivocal relationship with the church and the ironic way it’s treated in The Wrong Man.

Aside from an introductory prologue, Hitchcock forewent his usual cameo appearance in The Wrong Man, though he did manage to sneak into some of the movie’s posters and lobby cards. (This was from a scene that was filmed, but later cut.)

There’s a little bit of Catholicism in most of Hitch’s films

Even if at times it isn’t much more than an Ash Wednesday smudge. As such, it’s easy to say that he belonged to the 20th century’s small handful of Catholic modern artists — a very short list that also included Graham Greene (with whom he’d tried to work) and Expressionist French painter Georges Rouault. Hitch deeply appreciated the painter, once telling his friend and biographer Charlotte Chandler that he considered it a privilege to be able to afford a Rouault, which occupied pride of place in the foyer of Hitchcock’s Bel-Air road home.

Rouault produced several versions of La Suaire. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, the version that Hitch owned “depicts the face of the Redeemer as imprinted in blood on Christ’s burial shroud.” Perhaps it resembled the one shown here, with its emphasis on Christ’s bloodied condition.

Every era has its classic portrait of Christ. This one by Rouault, simply called La Sainte Suaire (often translated The Holy Face, but more accurately translated The Holy Shroud—like the Shroud of Turin, this is the imprint of his face upon his burial cloths), may be, at least for Catholics, the definitive Christ painting of the 20th century. Here, Jesus faces his horror with open eyes and what Buddhists might call radical acceptance. Rouaultesque paintings occasionally pop up in his films as well, often for a laugh — and with a sour aftertaste.

Sam Marlowe’s portrait of the corpse of Harry Worp, in The Trouble with Harry.

Mrs. Anthony’s portrait of “St. Francis” in Strangers on a Train.

Hitch must have seen the painter as a kindred spirit. Both artists dealt repeatedly with the same narrow list of subjects. Said the director to Truffaut: “Not that I’m comparing myself to him, but old Rouault was content with judges, clowns, a few women, and Christ on the Cross.” More or less, those same types keep popping up in Hitchcock’s films as well. Curious, isn’t it?

Jesus despised… from Rouault’s aquatint series, Miserere. According to scholar F. Agustoni, this set “was inspired by the suffering of human beings, which often can be without any reason for those who have to endure it, which makes it even more distressing” — an apt description of Manny Balastrero. Unlike Vertigo’s Scottie, Manny never asks “Why me?”

The Wrong Man could almost be subtitled “Variations on a Theme by Rouault.” The story is about an everyman, a New York-bred Italian Catholic from Queens—one Christopher Manuel Balastrero (Henry Fonda)—who’s wrongly accused of committing a series of robberies. In a case of mistaken identity, he’s arrested and put through the legal system as if compelled to hit the road to Golgotha. The film takes viewers in detail through the humiliation of his arrest, fingerprinting and incarceration, ending with the clang of the prison door as it shuts over him — a sequence that fairly imitates a the Stations of the Cross.

A Christ figure, he carries the sins of another, and the movie goes out of its way to draw connections between Manny, whose proper names — Christopher Manuel — evoke Christ, while his nickname riffs on his humanity, or manhood — wordplay that Hitch wouldn’t have missed.

Numerous closeups of Manny capture him with downcast eyes, his face a silent, acquiescent mask — so like Rouault’s many depictions of Christ.

During the early years when Rouault was developing his own voice, he became friends with Catholic writer Léon Bloy, whose novels Le Désespéré (The Desperate,1887) and La Pauvre (The Poor, 1897) deeply affected the painter. Bloy was concerned with suffering, redemption and the rejection of the sordidness of this world, writing, “I have meditated long and often on suffering, I am now convinced that nothing else is supernatural in this world. All the rest is human.” Thoughts on the transcendent nature of suffering were expressed by Rouault through his painting — and they approximate Hitchcock’s sentiments in this film as well.

The Wrong Man is one of Hitch’s less-well-known masterpieces. Of all his films, it’s the one that most forsakes humor to remain grindingly bleak in its realism—and better for it. I’d like to leave you with a thought from art scholar Joshua Kind, who described Rouault’s worldview this way:

“He is perhaps existential; his world is that of suffering and melancholy. … Rarely if ever does [he escape] into a really savage renunciation of self and world — and yet it speaks with a quiet despair of the human condition.”

To watch The Wrong Man, you’d think Joshua Kind was also talking about Hitchcock.

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Originally published at www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com.