Hitchcock and Race: Is the Wrong Man a White Man?

Abstract

SO MUCH SCHOLARSHIP HAS APPEARED ON Alfred hitchcock that Thomas Leiten has written that makes sense speak of Hitchcock studies as a field of study (Hitchcock and Company i). Yet representation of race and ethnicity in has been neglected. Only two essays, James Morrison's Hitchcock's Ireland: The Performance of Irish Identity in Juno and Paycock and Under Capricorn and Richard Allen's John and Half-Caste: Identity and Representation in purport treat this important topic in any kind of detail. Morrison treats Irish identity not as a cultural phenomenon but rather as a political one. That is, identities are framed in relation political borders within which characters operate (Ireland and Australia, respectively) and their relationships British colonial power. Methods of communication, stereotypes, food, kinship patterns, cultural roles, and other folkways are largely ignored. Allen's essay investigates cinematic adaptation of Clemence Dane's Enter Sir John. In Dane's novel, murderous villain's (Handel Fane) racial identity as a half-caste assures his guilt and thereby plays a more significant narrative role than in Murder! (1930). Allen argues that decision emphasize Fane's sexual identity while reducing his racial background a MacGuffin represents the achievement of work while simultaneously pointing to limits ofthat achievement. Hitchcock uses racial/racist theme of novel complicate idea of an overly simplistic notion of sexual Identities, but in so doing, he leaves casual racism of 'half-caste' moniker unresolved (123). The Wrong Man (1956) employs a similar strategy by tempering Manny Balestrero's (Henry Fonda) Italian background even as it preserves his ethnic name, ethnicness of his Italian relatives, and his Catholic beliefs. Whereas Murder! retreated from a more radical statement about ethnic/racial inequality in favor of an interest in sexual, The Wrong Man Anglicizes Manny moderate film's challenge toward stereotypical association (especially in Hollywood films) between Italian ethnicity and criminality. In so doing, film, which levels a strong critique at 1950s American conformity, ultimately conforms itself by refusing offer a protagonist who is both innocent and blatantly ethnic. Unfortunately, ethnic and racial aspects of this and other Hitchcock films has been largely ignored by Hitchcock scholars, who have tended marginalize these issues in favor of an interest in representation of gender norms, psychoanalytic aspects of his work, and formal mastery of his films. The Wrong Man is one of many Hitchcock films that deals significantly with issues of race and ethnicity, and investigation of these topics should be a primary concern of Hitchcock studies. The Wrong Man is a downbeat film about a middle-class Italian American wrongly accused of robbery. After being falsely charged, Balestrero passively accepts injustices that befall him because he feels he does not have means or right protest. Rather than encouraging audiences sympathize with his plight, film castigates oppressive conformity that resulted from and, in rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, supposedly assured security of 1950s (Sterriti 66-67).1 As Donald Spoto writes, [t]o view The Wrong Man primarily as condemnation of a harsh and impersonal judicial system is miss its wider scope and limit its provocative potential . . . [Hitchcock's] mistrust and fear are directed at whole of society, at tenuous psychological structures we build as a defense against that society (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock 288). In some ways, then, Manny Balestrero is similar one of his literary contemporaries, Tom Rath. The protagonist of Sloan Wilson's 1955 best-selling novel The Man in Gray Flannel Suit is similarly obsessed with kowtowing (at least at start of novel) society's expectations. …