Movie Story Type: Mistaken Identity
In an ongoing series of posts on movie types and sub-genres. So far we’ve looked at:
Body Switch
Buddy Picture
Fish-Out-Of-Water (FOOW)
Frustration Comedy
Road Picture
Today we look at Mistaken Identity. The basic premise is that a primary character is identified wrongly as someone else. Some great examples:
* The Wrong Man (1956): Hitchcock film where the Protagonist (played by Henry Fonda) is wrongly identified as a criminal.
* Life of Brian (1979): A Monty Python movie in which the main character (Brian) spends his whole life being mistaken as the Messiah.
* Being There (1979): The Protagonist Chauncey (Peter Sellers) is a dimwitted soul whose utterances are mistaken for profundity.
* Galaxy Quest (1999): Members of a canceled sci-fi show are mistakenly identified by aliens as being actual space warriors.
But possibly the most famous mistaken identity movie is another Hitchcock movie North by Northwest (1959). Here is the IMDB one-line description of the plot:
A hapless New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive.
Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman don’t waste any time playing the mistaken identity card. Here’s the opening of the movie and the plot point happens right at minute 05:30:
A mistaken identity element is not only a great way to propel a story forward, it also helps to create a bond between the reader and the Protagonist: We know they’re innocent even if other characters in the movie do not.
What other mistaken identity movies can you think of?
[Originally posted February 27, 2009]