The one scene Alfred Hitchcock wishes he hadn’t shot: “I should never have done that in the film”
Hindsight will always remain defeated at 20/20 and with a 100% track record, which left Alfred Hitchcock in the unfortunate position of wishing he’d never shot a scene that flew against the rules he was trying to impose on his own movie.
It wasn’t as if it came back to haunt him years later, either, with the ‘Master of Suspense’ admitting that he was never sold on the sequence from the start. Still, he decided to keep it in the final cut despite his reservations, which meant that his opinion of the entire picture became permanently soured.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time the legendary director voiced his regrets over his work. The ending of 1936’s Sabotage was a particularly sore point for Hitchcock, who admitted that his call to predicate the film’s final moments around an exploding bomb was one he wouldn’t make again if he were given the chance for a do-over.
The maestro behind several of the greatest thrillers in cinema history was always confident in his abilities, which comes with the territory of being one of Hollywood’s most influential and essential auteurs, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t above confessing to his sins whenever there was an egregious error in his camerawork or composition that didn’t sit right with him.
20 years after Sabotage, 1956’s The Wrong Man placed him in a similar situation. An outlier in every sense of the word, it was the only time Hitchcock overtly dabbled in docudrama and remained the one picture in his filmography based on a true story that largely followed the real-life events to the letter.
Adapted from Christopher Maxwell’s nonfiction book The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, Henry Fonda played the title character, an innocent man arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Hammering the audience over the head with The Wrong Man‘s origin, theatrical screenings began with a short prologue of Hitchcock’s silhouette informing them that “every word is true.”
It was supposed to be a more experimental film, but the director couldn’t help himself from wading in and stamping it with his auteurial authority. “The mistake I made in The Wrong Man was letting the director intrude anywhere in the film,” he said. “It should have been strictly impersonal.”
When asked if he was satisfied with the movie, Hitchcock answered honestly: “Not entirely.” His biggest issue was injecting a specific sequence with too much style for its own good, leaving him to wonder why he’d even bothered doing it in the first place.
“I had the moment when Henry Fonda was whispering a prayer to a figure of Christ on the wall, and then I slowly dissolved to a street in Queens, and the figure was coming along until it came and superimposed its face over Fonda, and you saw that this was the real man,” he explained. “I should never have done that in the film because it never took place.”
Despite his desire to make The Wrong Man as intimate and true to life as possible, Hitchcock’s instincts as a showman got the better of him. Dissolves, superimpositions, and fictional moments flew in the face of the docudrama style he was trying to achieve, which left him irritated at his inability to take on a more passive role than usual as a filmmaker.
