bureaucracy: the movie. this is a perfect storm of every bad element from previous hitchcock films, but all put together. it's the sole film during his "golden period" that's out-and-out not good. worse yet, it's just a boring slog. there are a few interesting elements to the film. it's got an opening rather like hitchcock's tv show, where he addresses the audience. he tells them that the story is all true, and then there's a screen full of writing telling us it's all true, and then another screen at the end telling us it's all true. guess what? it's true. that kind of boring waste-of-time is typical of the film, which walks us through the whole process of a man being wrongly accused for a crime he didn't commit, through to the result of his trial. not only from the film's title, but also from the first 20 minutes of the movie that show his boring daily routine, we have no doubt he's innocent at any time. i think this is meant to provoke outrage at all the shoddy police work that follows, but it rather has the result of draining the whole thing of any suspense. the procedures themselves are laughable, but are mostly true according to this article which hitchcock seems to have used nearly verbatim for the film's script: https://books.google.com/books?id=ckgeaaaambaj&pg=pa97#v=onepage&q&f=false the film does skip over things like reading someone their rights, letting them call a lawyer, asking them about their whereabouts on the date of the crime... you know, the basics. it instead focuses on the experience of henry fonda as possibly the most sad sack milquetoast protagonist since george mcfly. hitchcock actually manages to get a poor performance out of fonda by apparently telling him to act frozen and unemotive all film. fonda's wife is played by the excellent vera miles, who starts off well but is then tasked with playing a 1950s version of mental illness as written by the same screenwriter of spellbound. in other words, melodrama that's ignorant and unrealistic. i was ready to blame hitchcock for misogyny (as he clearly had a woman-hating streak) but it appears the "hysterical woman" storyline is sadly rooted in reality. actually most of the details that seem like melodrama turn out to be based in truth. the problem is that when you're not fighting off sleep, the film is hard to take seriously. people have been blasting the trial of the chicago seven lately for being overly dramatic, but sometimes we need that high emotion to communicate the parts of a legal story that deserve a huge reaction. hitchcock, surprisingly, really mismanages the tone here. he turns a story that should be on the level of 12 angry men into something that seems like an overlong tv episode. some experimental camera moves and fades aside, even a typically jarring bernard hermann score can't make this stimulating. this had a lot of potential to address issues like confirmation bias and prejudice in law enforcement (despite their film portrayal, manny balestrero and his wife, rose giolito, were not so white) but many films made since then have done a much better job. a contemporary review of this film said it best, written by richard l. coe of the washington post: "having succeeded often in making fiction seem like fact, alfred hitchcock in 'the wrong man' now manages to make fact seem like fiction. but it is not good nor interesting fiction."