Hitch himself introduces this film as a recreation of a true story, that is 'stranger than anything in my fictions'. It's certainly made with his usual finesse, but one note is that early on we seem to be focusing on details - hands, especially, feet, the rosary beads, the fingerprinting process - it's as though Hitch was doing Bresson - Un Condemné à Mort comes to mind specifically (though that not being released in the US until the following year makes it unlikely that he'd seen it). Also of course you can't help thinking about Hitch being locked in a cell when he was a boy (to teach him a lesson) and it's almost like this is purgatory (or therapy).
Nice guy Henry Fonda is arrested for a crime he hasn't committed - in Kafkaesque fashion the witnesses all identify him as the culprit. In the film's only humorous moment, two giggling girls inform him that one of the witnesses who could alibi him are dead.
The real victim of all this turns out to be his wife, played brilliantly by Vera Miles, who cracks up - seemingly with the idea that she is the guilty one. At the conclusion of the film something really weird happens - Fonda prays to a religious painting, then there's on overlay - a man walks into shot so that his face and Fonda's becomes superimposed - he looks a little like him - he's the real villain, who's then caught and the nightmare is abruptly over. Is Hitchcock making a religious statement here? I don't think he was particularly religious but it's an interesting thought. (He himself described it to Truffaut as 'an ironic coincidence'.) What with the prison childhood stuff, and the parallel Miles story, you start wondering whether this isn't the most personal film he made, and thus one of the most interesting.
The A Team is on hand - sterling work from Robert Burks, George Tomasini, Bernard Herrmann - there's a moment where Miles is looking at a painting and the incidental music is so like Vertigo, it's almost like we've stepped ahead into that film, with the added resonance that it was Miles who was supposed to play the Madeleine role, only she fell pregnant. (As a complete tangent, it is interesting to speculate how she would have played it.)
A stand-out shot is one where the camera seems to follow Fonda into his cell through a slit in the door - no idea how that was achieved.
Made for Warner Brothers. Written by Maxwell Anderson and Angus McPhail (Whisky Galore, Dead of Night, It Always Rains on Sunday, Went the Day Well).
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