The Wrong Man (1956) & Richard Jewell (2019) After finally catching up with Clint Eastwood's account of the wrongly accused security guard Richard Jewell, we immediately thought of comparing it to Alfred Hitchcock's one and only rendition of a true story done in semi-documentary style.....his first and last attempt at this kind of journalistic genre.
Two iconic directors. Two true stories of two men singled out with false accusations, upending their lives in terrible anxiety, dread and tragedy. Two very different director agendas and techniques in telling these stranger-than-fiction stories.
As all Hitchcock lovers know, the director's fear and unease of police permeates his filmography, supposedly the result of a tough-love prank played on him by his father when he was a child.....having the boy tossed into a jail cell as a lesson to show him what happens to bad people......
.......which would explain why Hitchcock heroes often found themselves wrongfully accused of crimes they didn't commit and spent a majority of their time on the run from cops and other authority figures.
The director found the penultimate version of this tale in the grim true saga of New York City nightclub musician Manny Balestrero, mistakenly charged with the armed robbery of neighborhood stores and insurance company offices. (The real criminal bore an uncanny resemblance to him, causing the robbery victims to wrongly identify Balestrero in police line-ups.....)
Leaving his preferred, carefully controlled confines of studio production, Hitchcock went out on the actual NYC streets and locations where Balestrero, played with subtle, haunting reserve by Henry Fonda, became trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare.
Long before the Supreme court Miranda ruling, the 1950's detectives were able to quickly railroad Balestrero into interrogations and an indictment without ever letting him see a lawyer. The burden of the false charges sent Balestrero's emotionally fragile wife Rose (Vera Miles) into a nervous breakdown....(.which the film, in its one major untruth, claims she eventually recovered from.....she did not.)
The film critics of the day dismissed "The Wrong Man" as an oddball, mundane effort from Hitchcock but today it's taken its place among his all time classics, celebrated by film writers, historians and fans like Martin Scorsese.
Everything anyone loved and admired in the director's best work is on full display here - the meticulous use of editing and camera movement to accentuate the mounting sense of dread and unease. as Henry Fonda helplessly watches his life undone and marriage destroyed.....(the expected Hitchcock closeups of Fonda's hands smeared with fingerprinting ink and the handcuffs slapped on his wrists.)
And that sums up Hitchcock's principle agenda here.....the film effectively achieves his simple, primary goal.... to.make you cringe with discomfort as you watch it and feel as queasy as Hitchcock did when his dad forced him into a little jail time....for no reason whatsoever.
Fonda and Vera Miles perform their roles expertly and among the supporting players, watch for Doreen Lang as one of the traumatized robbery victims, later to play that memorable bit as the hysterical mother who shrieks at Tippi Hedren in "The Birds". Even composer Bernard Herrmann got into the low-key spirit of things, contributing only a bit of spare, ominous score.
"The Wrong Man" a frozen in time snapshot of 1950's justice combined with Hitchcock's deepest themes, remains a 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS.
Richard Jewell, another bizarre true story of an innocent man falsely targeted by law enforcement, arrived 63 years later in 2019, courtesy of that tireless senior citizen and new-movie-every-year director, Clint Eastwood.
But in our current day and age of toxic political divisions, rabid right-winger Eastwood had far more on his mind than simply a visual account Jewell's wrongfully accused anguish.......
In Jewell's travails, Eastwood no doubt saw a golden opportunity to strike a more current blow against those two institutions he felt treated Donald Trump unfairly - the FBI and mass media.
We'd agree with Clint that in their foul treatment of Jewell, they had it comin'. On flimsy, circumstantial evidence that would never hold up in court, the FBI zeroed in on Jewell as their primary suspect in the bombing of a concert during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics....even though as a security guard on duty he was instrumental in alerting police to the bomb and preventing a worse casualty count than occurred. Then the Feds apparently colluded with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to leak their suspicion of Jewell to the public (with the help of reporter Kathy Scruggs, but the film does itself no favors by fictitiously depicting her as a predatory slut, trading sex for FBI inside info.....)
With Eastwood's well known "one-take-and-let's-move-on" rapid fire filmmaking, you know won't see all the cinematic nuances that Hitchcock brought to "The Wrong Man"......just meat 'n potatoes, point-and-shoot, with few attempts at subtext or subtlety.
But after over a half century of film directing, he knows how to cast his films with unerring savvy and the actors of "Richard Jewell" are all the MVPs here, starting with Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell, the pudgy, over zealous law enforcement fanboy who found himself transformed from hero to pariah in a matter of days. Also strongly putting the story across are Jon Hamm as the driven, obsessed FBI agent, Sam Rockwell as Jewell's street-smart lawyer, Olivia Wilde as Kathy Scruggs and Kathy Bates as Jewell's distraught, loving mom.
Clint Eastwood never gets in the way of his actors and their work, along with his usual modest, quietly competent style make the film a 3 star (***) experience well worth seeing.
Even with endings that left both tormented men exonerated, there were no real Hollywood style conclusions for Manny Balestrero and Richard Jewell. Balestrero coped and suffered through his wife's mental illness until she died twelve years before his own passing. Richard Jewell died of a heart aliment at only 44 years old.
Even the movies couldn't do full justice to the agonies of these men when they were chosen by the cruelest of fate.....and the wrong arm of the law.
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