Acclaim for Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men:

• “VERDICT: Come for the Hitchcock, stay for the history. Fascinating.”
  — Library Journal

• “Arresting and important.”
  — New York Journal of Books

• “A profoundly vital text.”
  — The Film Stage

• “Well-researched and well-crafted.”
  — Newsday

• “Revealing and insightful.”
  — Noir City, the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation

As a movie about the criminal justice system, The Wrong Man was ahead of its time. In the 1950s, American courts continued to invoke the assurance of a New York appellate judge, Learned Hand, that the risk of wrongful conviction was an “unreal dream.”  Hitchcock makes the contrary case. In fact, the film’s most famous line is an ironic reformulation of Judge Hand’s premise. “An innocent man has nothing to fear,” the detectives tell Balestrero as they interrogate him. But The Wrong Man explodes that cliché. It shows how the routines of law enforcement transformed eyewitness mistakes into a miscarriage of justice.

(From the introduction to Nothing to Fear)

In the 20 years before Hitchcock made The Wrong Man, a series of mistaken identity cases jolted New York’s legal system. The most famous of these cases saw one of these two men, Bertram Campbell (his photo is on the right), serve more than three years in prison for the other’s crimes. “His conviction was the result of mistaken identity,” a New York judge wrote in a 1946 ruling. “But [he] suffered grievously during his long term in prison and while on parole resulting from his arrest, conviction and confinement for the commission of crimes of which he was innocent.”

The revelation of Campbell’s wrongful imprisonment fueled a fleeting reform initiative aimed at reducing the risk of erroneous conviction. Had the initiative succeeded, the course of American legal history might have been different.

At 4:30 on the morning of August 11, 1940, Louis Hoffner (pictured in photo) was walking his dog in Brooklyn when police arrested him for murder. Like Manny Balestrero, Hoffner was subjected to prejudicial identification procedures and then prosecuted by the Queens District Attorney’s office for a crime he did not commit. He was convicted, and served 12 years in prison, based on the testimony of a single eyewitness. In 1952, however, the Supreme Court for Queens County threw out his conviction. “[A]ll the wealth of the State of New York could not compensate the claimant for the mental anguish suffered through nearly twelve years of false imprisonment, under the impression that he would be there for the rest of his life,” the Court said.

Hoffner’s ordeal is an incredible story of unfair lineup procedures, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and a reporter’s tireless campaign to free an innocent man.

While the Campbell and Hoffner cases made front-page news, the exoneration of Thomas Oliver, an 18-year-old Black man, barely registered with the New York media. In 1946, Oliver was wrongfully convicted of first-degree robbery based on an eyewitness mistake. The jury rejected the testimony of alibi witnesses who insisted that Oliver was home in bed when the robbery was committed.

In a telling failure to acknowledge a miscarriage of justice against a Black defendant, the State Judicial Council did not mention Oliver’s case in a study of erroneous identification released soon after his exoneration.

Part One of Nothing to Fear will tell the stories of Campbell, Hoffner, Oliver and other innocent defendants who were imprisoned as a result of a failure to scrutinize eyewitness identifications, the lack of fair or reliable lineup procedures, and other institutional failures.

In 1953, Manny Balestrero became another victim of chronic flaws in New York’s criminal justice system.

Manny was a bass player at The Stork Club, an exclusive night club on East 53rd Street in Manhattan. He lived in this house at 41-30 73rd Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, with his wife, Rose, and their two sons.

On January 14, 1953, Manny had arrived at home and was standing on the front doorstep when he heard someone call out “Hey, Chris.”  He looked back to the street and saw three men, who then identified themselves as detectives.

From this moment on, Manny’s life would never be the same.

Inside this building, which houses the headquarters of the 110th police precinct station in Elmhurst, two women identified Manny as the man who twice robbed the Prudential Insurance Office. Newspapers would later attribute this mistaken identification, and Manny’s false arrest, to his resemblance to a “double” who committed the crimes. But, as with other famous mistaken identity cases that preceded it, reports of the resemblance proved greatly exaggerated.

Nothing to Fear will explore the real causes of Manny’s ordeal.

The true story that inspired The Wrong Man is not just of a tale of one man’s suffering. In a tragic example of the profound and spiraling effects of false arrest, Rose Balestrero (pictured in photo) experienced a nervous breakdown before Manny’s trial. A woman with no history of mental illness, Rose remained institutionalized, and therefore separated from Manny and her two sons, for two years.

The Balestreros later filed a lawsuit seeking financial compensation for their suffering, only to face a new series of legal obstacles.

In 2014, on the initiative of Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, the intersection of 73rd Street and 41st Avenue in Queens was re-named “Manny ‘The Wrong Man’ Balestrero Way.” At a ceremony unveiling a sign for the new name, Dromm expressed the hope that the sign will inspire people to investigate the history of the case and “learn about their community, about cinematic history and continue to think critically about how our justice system works” (reported by Jason D. Antos, Jackson Heights Co-Naming Immortalizes “Wrong Man,” Queens Gazette, Oct. 1, 2014).

Nothing to Fear will provide the definitive account of the Balestrero case and its place in legal and cinematic history.

Alfred Hitchcock saw in the Balestrero case not only a vehicle for exploring his own obsessions, but also the opportunity to break from Hollywood conventions by presenting a story of wrongful prosecution from the perspective of the accused. “It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated with hardened criminals,” he told director Francois Truffaut, as recorded in Truffaut’s classic book, Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster Revised Edition, 1985).

It was not until decades after The Wrong Man’s release that the unreliability of eyewitness identifications became widely recognized. That growing consensus emerged at first from social science research and analysis of perception and memory. Of course, the most potent evidence of the risks of erroneous identification lies in the hundreds of exonerations that followed the introduction of DNA evidence.

Arriving more than 30 years before the first of the DNA cases, The Wrong Man stands as a prescient cultural marker of the destructiveness of eyewitness errors. But the film is ultimately less an indictment of the mistaken witnesses than a commentary on the way the justice system uses this unreliable evidence.

(Excerpted from Nothing to Fear).

The physical manifestation of accusation and guilt is a motif that pervades The Wrong Man. It continues in the squad car, where Manny is sandwiched between two detectives, their shoulders operating as restraints. Thereafter, Hitchcock relentlessly gives us shots of the detectives touching Manny's arm, shoulder or back while directing him with varying degrees of force. A pre-arrest sequence alone features at least nine such images. This motif not only conveys the presumption of guilt used by the detectives, but also signals a permanent marking of Balestrero as a victim of false accusation that will later spread in his household like a contagion.

(Excerpted From Nothing to Fear)

Early in the film, the detectives require Manny to walk back and forth before the owner of a liquor store that was robbed. The scene marks the recurrence of a gesture that Henry Fonda (as Manny) ingeniously deploys in his performance. When the detectives first call out to him outside his house, Manny looks back over his shoulder at them. At this point his face registers mere curiosity. Then, as the detectives escort him to their car and rebuff his request to alert Rose, Manny looks back toward the house -- again, over his shoulder -- with growing concern. By the time he repeats the gesture (twice) in the liquor store, the quick turn of the head and the widening of his eyes project fear and panic. In each case, the police have induced the gesture -- once by calling out his name, once by forcibly separating him from Rose, and now by requiring him to parade before a proprietor under inherently suspicious circumstances. As a result, the progression of the gesture becomes a metaphor for how the police have made Manny “appear” guilty.

(Excerpted From Nothing to Fear)

As we see the Balestreros’ lives unravel, The Wrong Man can be painful to watch. Hitchcock withholds the crowd-pleasing elements of conventional Hollywood exoneration stories. But not every great film delivers a great time. And by creating empathy with Manny and Rose, The Wrong Man challenges us to interrogate the reasons for their suffering.

(Excerpted from Nothing to Fear)

While The Wrong Man shows us the institutional flaws that contribute to the prosecution of the innocent, the characters in the film do not speak about those flaws. That narrative strategy subverts the expectations created by the casting of Henry Fonda, whose soulful dignity gave voice to moments of surpassing eloquence in other social justice films like The Grapes of Wrath. We anticipate a stirring speech from Fonda that challenges the system, but one never arrives. Instead, consistent with the film’s understated realism, Manny is left struggling to say at anything at all.

(Excerpted from Nothing to Fear)

This is the story of New York’s fleeting awakening, some 75 years ago, to the reality of wrongful convictions. It is the story of the falsely-accused defendants whose suffering led to early cries for systemic improvements to protect the innocent. It is the story of how the state’s legal institutions squandered an opportunity for reform. And it is the story of how Hollywood’s most popular director made a work of art that reveals truths that those institutions refused to face.

(From the Introduction to Nothing to Fear)