THE JUSTICE OF ORDINARY JUSTICE

...The film unfolds in the straight line of the events as they happened...

...Boh many of the other actors appear nj conscious types, in line with an unfoa tunate tendency of the film to givj many of the true aspects of the am a varnish of symbolism...

...Today, in a minute world within a cosmos that is no longer mysterious, but only vastly problematical, the monsters of the most elaborate imaginings are tamed to entertainment by their presumptive absurdity...

...But they are overdrawn afl overstressed, and embedded in rhet«| ic...

...But the crucial precedenJ$B the application of traditional tvM of evidence to the "patterns" JM risky actions, the naming and subgH sion to cross-examination of accual the taking of testimony under ojM the relevance and propriety of ha| say, and the presumption of injfl cence until guilt is proven, are Jj ply evaded as surely unnecessasj when "security" is at stake...

...And, while it carefully states the dangers of Communist infiltration against which the security procedures are designed, and depicts how the functioning of the latter can result in profound injustice, it leaves many vital questions which arise unanswered, and the most serious ones unasked...

...In way, however, the device is justified by the very expectations we have of what a Hitchcock film will purpose and achieve...

...The fact is stressed that the case was one of the earliest under the "new" security program, and had no precedents against which to me^fl defects...

...The case is one of the most famous of those arising from security procedures in the federal government, involving a loyal, capable employe of the Navy Department in Washington who was summarily dismissed as a security risk in 1953, on flimsy, yet virtually undisprovable grounds...

...The streets, subways, stores, houses, offices, courtrooms, and jails of the city appear as they are, not as studio reconstructions...

...The viewer is not titillated by vicarious thrills, the more delicious because they are so surely imaginary...

...Ernest Borgnine, as the embattle) civil servant, Ray Milland as his km yer, and Virginia Christine as wtt wife, give capable performances...

...This is all very well: the government's problems are undeniably enormous, and it is possible to make a critical evaluation which takes them into account, while insisting upon the individual's right to justice...

...But the price innocence has had to pay for its recognition is indelibly marked, as the close of the film, depicting actuality, shows his wife still under treatment in a mental institution, and only a printed afterword states that she returned to her family after two years...

...He observes what has happened to another, in all its particulars, and knows it could happen to himself...

...Careful preparation for what is to be created during shooting and given final form during editing is regarded by Hitchcock as vital to his technique...

...Attention to details has always been a signal characteristic of Hitchcock's style...

...The rallyilM of the community behind the inn cent man, the encouragement givM him by a Presbyterian minister, jfl though he is Jewish, the testimoM on his behalf by a man who had befl his bitterest opponent in communfifl affairs, all may have elements JH truth...

...of his agony during almost two years of unwilling unemployment, while security hearing boards cleared him and the preservative tortuousness of anonymous bureaucracy denied him reinstatement, could make the drama at least as arresting as that of the unlucky musician in The Wrong Man— and far more topically significant...

...In The Wrong Man, he does not simply exercise his fluency for virtuoso effects, but has something serious to say about things he has treated lightly before—and reveals the fruition of all the ingredients of his style by speaking the truth with such art that it speaks with awesome fluency for itself...

...The camera almost never sees anything that could not be visible to the principals...

...I prefer to go for effects, rather than explanations," he asserted...

...We cannot believe that it « really happened, just this way, in cannot be disturbed as we ought fl be—except inversely, by the fial fundamental complacency...

...He consciously did not try for the sublime, the profound, or the socially critical—except as he satirized manners, or had occasional fun with notions of law and order, and the dignity and efficiency of the police...

...The hysterical certainty of the musician's accusers, which so easily shifts to the real robber when he is luckily discovered, is so credibly portrayed that we find ourselves outraged—as we should be always in the face of injustice...

...The Justice Of Ordinary Justice by MARTIN S. DWORKIN UNJUST accusation and punishment is a perennial terror for the law-abiding—and hence a traditional, and now an especially provocative, theme for melodrama...

...The individual is not created to represent metaphorically the typical, but actually personifies the universal inherent in each particular...

...Above all, the conception and execution demonstrate Hitchcock's amazing fluency in film, that before so regularly exhausted the vocabulary of the merely sensational, that he deliberately set himself progressively difficult exercises to maintain his own interest—such as the long takes with a single camera he used in Rope...

...The film, however, while using "documentary" techniques, does not achieve a convincing realism...

...Perhaps it is a sign that the fearsome is becoming secularized, with all the ends and means of man, as the state continues to acquire the attributes of deity and devil...

...Hitchcock has always asserted his belief in happy endings for his films—although his television series of short thrillers has been less considerate of audience sentimentalism, perhaps because people are thought to be somehow tougher in their own living rooms than in theaters...

...The clarity of The Wrong Man derives first from a screen play, by Maxwell Anderson and Angus Mac-Phail, of remarkable concision and eloquence of understatement...

...Here safeguards at replaced by reassurances that the government is great and good, after all, and that the individual ought just to have faith and patience fo the faults to be ironed out to happ perfection...

...By "suffering" he meant being entertained by spiraling suspense, to the limit of toleration...

...He told questioners at the Cinema 16 film group in New York last year that he believes in planning every detail, and stated his contempt for those film makers who do not know what will appear on the film, until they see daily rushes—or even the final version in the theater...

...For one thing, the sense of space in the home of the accused man is that of an actual house of such modesty— thereby adding to the feeling of ordinary circumstances closing in...

...This outcome may be inherent in the film's fundamentally diffused purposes...

...The blind impersonality of justice—the splendid objectivity that without wisdom and humanity becomes tyranny—takes on the old gooseflesh chill of ghosts and other supernatural agencies in the new tales of horror, as Kafka illustrates...

...Based upon a series of magazine articles for which Anthony Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize, and written and directed by Philip Dunne, Three Brave Men desires, first of all, to dramatize the struggle of one man against governmental injustice...

...The awakening of the musician, Henry Fonda, to the reality of what is happening to him has the true unreality of the waking nightmare in which we find ourselves at times of Serisis...

...As throughout The Wwjj Man, it is in the vividly delineajH particulars that we establish our iH ognition of our own involvemflfl our concern with the theme of justice in the ordinary, indivi instance that might be our own...

...Not surprisingly, the most effecwj things in Three Brave Men are sfl pie details—such as the descriptH of how easy it is for the man to cUjfl his desk of his personal effects (uiwM the scrutiny of a Naval security W ficer), and be shunted out of a plfl where he has worked for more tnfl 20 years...

...The Wrong Man does not end in the burst of romantic catharsis which he has consistently provided after punishing the audience for its own entertainment...

...It is the ordinary that is most frightening, and the terrible ways of men most mysterious, as they are infinitely ordinary...

...Hitchcock has made a point of ignoring criticisms of his thematic superficiality...

...In The Wrong Man we enter the life of a sober, hard-working musician who was mistakenly identified as a rob ber six years ago in New York City The circumstances of his life, any their invasion and dislocation by the procedures of the law, are meticu lously portrayed, with such art that P& ordinary achieves ajErightening generality...

...In 30 years of making thrillers like Blackmail, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much (two ver-sions,) suspense is here created, for the first time, not for its own sake, to excruciate for pleasure, but to in volve us in a drama that is deeply dis turbing, and meaningful A case of ordinary justice, in which an ordinary man is enmeshed in a web of ordinary circumstances, may eventuate in such extraordinary in-justice that ordinary principles are brought into searching question...

...By contrast, Three Brave Men, also about a true case of unjust accusation, and the sufferings of innocence, does not allow the truth to speak for itself, but calls upon oratory in its behalf...

...A case of ordinary justice, recreated according to the techniques of a scrupulous realism, is what Alfred Hitchcock presents in The Wrong Man...

...The detectives' reiterated assurance, "An innocent man has nothing to fear," rings with chilling irony in our ears, as we observe the contingency of the necessarily impersonal procedures for fixing innocence and guilt...

...It is necessary to make clear that the story to be told is true, as the manner of its telling is so superbly realistic that we are likely to admire it as but one more demonstration of a master story-teller's consummate facility More than this, it is worth empha-sizing that The Wrong Man is a dif-ferent kind of Hitchcock movie...

...Significantly, the case it treats is not one of a man accused of robbery, or murder, or any traditional felony...

...The editing by George Tomasini (and, of course, Hitchcock) produces a trenchantly economical, deceptively simple re-creation of the facts...

...But he has ever been the weaver of elaborate narrative traceries in which details provided a background filigree of credibility for the meshing of convenient coincidences...

...The story of his battle to show the charges to be ridiculous, and that personal prejudice apparently motivated his unnamed accusers...

...I hope you've suffered this evening," he told Cinema 16, after a preview of his remade The Man Who Knew Too Much...

...Here his purpose is to recreate the truth, in the order and particularity of its occurrence, and he depicts details with an exacting realism, so that what happens is not only wholly believable, but personally shocking...

...The device of the foreword, with Hitchcock's shadowed figur] standing in the darkened emptiness of a great terminal, may be a little too elegant, in line with the self-conscious superciliousness he has carefully cultivated in making himself a trademark for his products...

...The sequence of his being booked, fingerprinted, and placed in sjfcil builds to tremendous force, until mi know, ourselves, what it is to be pttprisoned...

...Unlike his other films, he says, this one tells a story that is true, ". . . every word of it," but it "contains elements stranger than any" he has ever offered...

...The gradual breakdown of his wife, Vera Miles, is one of the most accurate, convincing representations of insanity to appear in the theatrical film...

...But the injustice is never represented as such, as the film simultaneously wishes to defend and acclaim the security program, on the ground of the severity of the Communist challenge...

...And a case of ordinary justice: impersonal institutionalism concentrated upon the single person, alone and irre-ducibly separate, may focus the terrors of the ordinary to pin-point heat...

...Spooks were terrifying when they were believed to exist...

...The entanglement which begins to weave inexorably about innocent, unknowing people is not contrived of coincidences, fictively appropriate, but of the truly fortuitous, with the mad consistency of the absurd...

...The musician's innocence is established...

...Speaking a foreword in the manner of his television series, Hitchcock prepares the audience for an innovation in his long career as master of suspense melodramas...

...The workmanlike, matter-of-fact operations of the police, the courts, and jails are impeccably represented, under the for-once-followed guidance of technical advisers: a retired police officer and a district attorney who actually dealt with the case...

...The detailed realism establishes the otherness of the man, his uniqueness—while simultaneously impressing that his case could be anyone's...

...Deliberate symbolism is eschewed, as is essential to true realism...

...After a good memory, the most important thing for a director to have, he said, is a clear conception of what his film is all about...

...But Three Brave Men adopts a manner of self-conscious, hortatory patriotism in which the individual is submerged, and the real issues dissolved in a reassuringly sanctimonious happy ending...

...In Tim Wrong Man, the entire drama deveS oped out of the contingency of evm these safeguards upon justice to tm individual, and it was made plail that only a miraculous chance inta vened to save a man from unjujj imprisonment...