Saw The Wrong Man, an other Hitchcock. This one deals with a button-down family-man musician who is accused of a crime he did not commit. Hitch himself appears in a pre-movie monologue to assure us that this really did happen. The film becomes incredibly Kafkaesque after he is arrested, with the cops playing mind games with him and making him perform seemingly absurd actions: "I want you to enter that store, walk to the back, and then return to us here." It turns out this is a form of identification, the results of which are to be collected via telephone. We viewers, tied to the viewpoint of the musician, never hear the results. He even rankles at the indignity of it all which echoes The Trial strongly. The tension mounts and things look worse and worse for our hero. There's even a red-herring plot point, a race-track form idly filled out, which I anticipated would become a source of angst but never did. Even the evil is unreliable. The sequence where our hero and his wife try to find two witnesses for his alibi is awesome. It's all dark shadows and looming objects, reinforcing the notion that our heroes are held in the sway of forces they cannot comprehend. The trials are dense gobbledygook, full of seemingly meaningless questions (at one point a witness is grilled about the attire of an unrelated man in a police line-up) and seemingly arbitrary decisions. Even the source of eventual salvation is, it is implied, at the hands of a yet greater force.
The film is great fun. Pulpy as Hitchcock ever is, but oh so gripping.
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