The Wrong Man Revisited: Nope, Not That One
Welcome to the new home of Paperback Zero. After so many, many years of being over at Blogspot, I finally decided to move it on over like Hank Williams to Substack, a day late and dollar short and my bucket all full of holes. The blog started in 2009 as kind of repository for my playlists for my rock’n’roll radio show, Zero Hour on WMSE in Milwaukee. Back in 2023, I changed the blog name to Paperback Zero with plans to expand the offerings to articles, interviews, reviews, etc. and all my pop culture obsessions. I’m continuing that mission here.
Thank you to my pal Tim Demeter for freshening up the classy Paperback Zero logo he created for me. Me and Tim along with other friends are currently working on what we hope will be the first of many zines. Our debut zine will be about one of the kings of crime writing, Dashiell Hammett; more about that soon.
Let’s now turn the channel back a few decades to the early 1990s, when cable television’s premium networks were airing more and more original movies and shows, especially of the “adult after dark” variety, to build and hold on to audiences that had dwindled some since cable’s great expansion in the 1980s. Showtime was especially prolific in this period, debuting dozens of movies and cool movie series such as Rebel Highway, in which modern directors of the time such as Joe Dante and Robert Rodriguez tackled the American International Pictures catalog. During this period, Showtime also delivered some solid crime and neo-noir movies, today mostly long forgotten and secluded on formats like VHS and laserdisc, including Dennis Hopper’s Nails (1992), Past Tense (1994), and today’s interest, The Wrong Man (1993), directed by Jim McBride.
It is not a remake of Alfred Hitchock’s 1956 movie starring Henry Fonda, but it does borrow its title and central focus of a man wrongly accused of a crime. McBride’s movie was the first of several efforts for Showtime by the director most famous for the groundbreaking David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and his remake of Breathless (1983), not to mention the first movie I saw by him, The Big Easy (1986). His failure to sell the mother humpin’ legend of one Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989’s Great Balls of Fire seems to have brought him premium cable’s way. For Showtime, he also directed 1997’s Pronto, based on the Elmore Leonard novel (review of that Peter Falk-starring movie coming soon), The Informant (1997), and an episode of the unjustly unavailable mid-‘90s noir series Fallen Angels, “Fearless,” co-written by Walter Mosley.
Set in Mexico, The Wrong Man is about Alex Walker, a merchant sailor (Kevin Anderson) who gets in murder trouble while on leave, and on the run from the police, links up for a wild, drunken, road trip to hell with the magnificent Mills: Missy (Rosanna Arquette) and Phillip (John Lithgow). Walker, like Warren Oates in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, wears a white suit through the movie, but The Wrong Man is not a dark tale of decapitation and annihilation in Mexico. It is a saucy and sleazy and sometimes silly film noir satire with touches of Tennessee Williams that is a fun, deliriously acted road movie about Americans being assholes south of the border.
Coming off Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), Lithgow plays Phillip with delight and maximum blustering that the actor expertly filters through levers of drunkenness, giddiness, and peckerwoodness and greases it all with a hard-to-pin-down moral code. He meets Alex’s youthful defiance with lines like “I like someone with shit in their shoes.” Rich Kogan in the Chicago Tribune did not appreciate Lithgow’s approach, which he called “stunningly weird.” He meant that as a bad thing, but Kogan might have been playing with a different set of rules than Lithgow and McBride had adopted for this Showtime effort.
While some praised Lithgow’s performance, Anderson seemed to bring out the grumpiness in a lot of critics. None more than the Toronto Star’s Craig MacInnis, who calls Anderson “an annoying little snip whose dramatic range veers from wooden determination to determined woodenness.” But for me, Anderson manages his role, which does not really ask very much of him, fine. Alex is a bit of youthful blank slate, a guy who deludes himself about his purity while stealing pickup lines from the man he is accused of offing, introducing himself to Missy by telling her he is in “the monkey business.”
Not surprisingly, Arquette’s Missy stirred the most attention, and, oh, yes, yes, Arquette most certainly sizzles through an assortment of monkey business in The Wrong Man. The promotional VHS I have hypes the movie as a “sultry sexpenser” (apparently a phrase Variety also used for Body Double, according to a recent episode of the Guide for the Film Fanatic podcast) and an “old style thriller with up-to-date nudity.” Arquette and McBride subvert the idea of a “femme fatale,” showing Missy sucking her thumb and twirling in her tight dresses and smiling like an eager little kid ready to hit the playground. Her husband, Phillip, is significantly older, and Alex is the perfect stupid playmate for her.
MacInnis did not think Arquette was right for the role, and added disapprovingly, “no major American actress I can think of has appeared without her clothes in so many scenes.” Indeed, Arquette’s nudity prompted a story in the Tribune before the movie aired with the headline “Arquette and Lithgow Do Nude Scene for Cable.” Arquette, who was about to turn 34 as the movie debuted, is fully committed to her steamy performance and in interviews seemed to mostly relish the role. However, she told USA Today that her request to McBride for a body double was denied, but ultimately, she decided the nudity was “crucial” for the scene. In a syndicated interview with Frank Lovece, she voiced her love of TV and cable movies and called most theatrical movies of the time “big action movies with no depth to them.” For The Wrong Man, Arquette said “the actors all fell in love with the dialogue, because most of us don’t get a chance to speak really sharp, interesting dialogue anymore.”
Filmed on location in Veracruz, Mexico, McBride’s movie is engagingly debauched throughout. In one scene, our merry Americans, as heavily sauced and rowdy passengers, cause a tourist bus to crash into a river. The Mexican police in pursuit of Alex are also quite entertaining, especially Jorge Cervera Jr. (Three Amigos, Real Women Have Curves) as the older bored, jaded cop who tracks him down. Los Lobos’ great moody “Blue Moonlight” plays over the ending credits. While the movie played only on Showtime in the United States, The Wrong Man hit some theaters in Europe and was screened at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Written by Michael Thoma, The Wrong Man was based on a story by Roy Carlson. Thoma played Gentry in Major League and wrote The Set Up (also not a remake), starring Billy Zane, for Showtime in 1995. As for Carlson, he also served as a producer on The Wrong Man and as screenwriter and producer for the following year’s China Moon, giving him a slight neo-noir double punch from which he promptly disappeared. His only other movie credit to date came on the 1985 vigilante flick Stand Alone, directed by Alan Beattie, who also served as a producer on The Wrong Man.
The Orlando Sentinel was ready to start a Roy Carlson Fan Club after seeing China Moon, which is set in the Tampa Bay area. Filmed in 1991, the Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe-starring movie was left to dry until 1994. But back in 1990, with cinema glory and the sound of money singing a sweet melody in their ears, the Sentinel thought Carlson, who had “come from Hollywood to show what can done,” might be the spark the state needed for more Florida-set movies. I guess they had the wrong …
You can find The Wrong Man on the Internet Archive.
