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Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

You can tell this thriller was once a radio play--it is mostly talk, and often over the telephone. But what drama can be built on a string of conversations around the office, in cars in the rain, out on a lonely beach on Staten Island, and on the telephone, often filled with mystery and doom.\

Not that it's not a visual movie, either. There is a big gloomy house, and lots of dark city streets. Shadows and moving camera and close-ups of faces and telephones, all keep you glued and increasingly worried. By the end, the really jarring, memorable end, you are ready for what you can never be ready for.

Beware, the plot is confusing. Even seeing it twice I had to pay attention to who was who, and what turn of events had just taken place. Part of the reason is there is a bewildering use of flashbacks, even flashbacks within flashbacks, told by all kinds of different characters. The plot is laid out methodically, but take notes as you go, or at least take note. The initial overheard phone call is key to it all, and it gets reinforced later somewhat, but pay heed there.

And the person on the phone? A sharp, bitter, convincing Barbara Stanwyck, who really knows how to be steely and vulnerable at the same time. Burt Lancaster is more solid and stolid, and maybe less persuasive overall, but he carries a more practical part of the story. It keeps coming back to Stanwyck in bed, and the telephone which is her contact with the facts, as they swirl and finally descend.

Director Anatole Litvak has some less known but thrilling dark dramas to look for, including Snake Pit. But this is his most sensational winner, partly for Stanwyck, and partly for the last five minutes, which is as good as drama gets.

Barbara Stanwyck (as Leona Stevenson) is a neurotic woman, confined to her bed. She is married to the very attractive, and mysterious, young Burt Lancaster (as Henry Stevenson). Ms. Stanwyck relies on a state-of-the-art 1940s corded telephone to help communicate her needs. One evening, she picks up her phone and overhears two men plotting a murder; eventually, the crime moves too close to Stanwyck for comfort…

Stanwyck is excellent as the spoiled, arrogant, and wealthy, but, ultimately, helpless heroine of Lucille Fletcher's adapted radio play (the part was originated on radio by Agnes Moorehead). The story picks up some flaws in its extension into a feature film; it is most frustrating as (flashbacks) ((within flashbacks)) (((within flashbacks))) occur; and, the story becomes a little confusing. Still, Stanwyck's fine performance carries the film to an exciting, tense, conclusion.

******** Sorry, Wrong Number (9/1/48) Anatole Litvak ~ Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey

Alfred Hitchcock himself praised this movie that was for him one of Barbara Stanwyck's most extraordinary parts.Besides,he did include Lucille Fletcher's short novel in his anthology "stories not for the nervous"(sic)

The story of this woman in her bed,who has heard on the phone someone is in danger,and who little by little discovers the horrible truth,is a first-class screen play which requires the viewer's attention,,or else he may lose the vital lead.The first people who enjoyed it had no pictures,since it was originally a radio broadcast,so they had to show a lot of imagination.The movie remains talky but the numerous flashbacks give it substance.The phone,is along with Stanwyck ,the star of Litvak's work;Burt Lancaster,a great actor though,only serves as a foil to both of them.50% of the dialogue consists of phone calls,that's what makes this thriller unique.

A strong connection with Hitchcock's work is the father's part(Ed Bigley).He is some equivalent of the Mother in many movies of his.The stuffed animals in his desirable mansion are a symbol of his daughter's lifelessness.(Coincidence?There will be such hunting trophies (and more) in his "psycho" twelve years later,and the topic is present in "the man who knew too much"(2nd version))

If you are fond of suspense,this is an unqualified must!

An expanded radio play and subsequent TV drama, this film builds terrific tension around a bedridden heiress and her telephone.

Sympathy builds for this unlikeable woman, Leona, played by Barbara Stanwyck. She is a spoiled heiress used to getting her own way, but as we come to see, very much created by her father (played by Ed Begley) who bows to all her wishes.

Her husband, Henry, played by Burt Lancaster, whom she chases and captures from her best friend, initially goes along with being an employee in her father's corporation but eventually starts chafing at the restraints imposed on him.

The movie just about plays in real time with the addition of many flashbacks, one of which secures the knowledge that there is nothing wrong with Leona, it is all psychosomatic based on her mother's fatal illness.

From the moment Leona accidentally overhears a plotted murder for later on that evening, the viewer is taken on a ride that builds suspense and tension to a terrifying conclusion and the movie's title.

Not to be missed. The cinematography is superb, a lot of play in light and shade. Barbara deserved an Oscar but lost. 8 out of 10.

Barbara Stanwyck is marvellous! Although she's a rather unlikeable character, she thoroughly captivates your emotions. She drags you completely into her nightmare - you can't look away and like a real nightmare, the sense of not being in control is chillingly real.

Apart from the flashbacks, which epitomise the film noir tropes of the late forties, this film is Barbara Stanwyck alone and scared and trapped in her trappings of wealth. She's confined in the physical and mental luxury jail cell she's made for herself. It's an exceptional performance of a woman in despair driven to the edge, of knowing something awful is about to happen but not being able to do anything about it. It's a perfect example of how a film can stretch out tension and suspense tighter and more intense with each passing minute.

And I also loved it when in one of the flashbacks, Fred shouts to his wife: Hey Sally, Joe wants a bottle of beer and she obligingly dashes out to the shop: oh how 1940s!

In New York, the spoiled Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanswick) is the invalid wife of the VP of a pharmaceutical industry Henry J. Stevenson (Burt Lancaster)and becomes aware of a murder that would be committed late night of that day through a "cross-wire", when she overhears two men planning the murder.

Leona tries to find the right number to tell the police and she discovers that her former friend and ex-girlfriend of Henry, Sally Hunt Lord (Ann Richards), had lunch with him. She recalls the first encounter with her husband and parts of her life with him through flashbacks. Along the night, she learns dirty secrets about Henry and she finds that she might be the intended victim.

"Sorry, Wrong Number" is a great film-noir with a suspenseful story and top-notch performances. The screenplay and the direction are excellent and keep the attention of the viewer until the end of the last scene. This movie deserves to be watched more than once and is highly indicated for fans of film noir. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "A Vida Por Um Fio - O Clássico" ("The Life for One Line - The Classic")

Note: On 29 September 2013, I saw this movie again.

A woman confined to a bed overhears a murder plot on a crossed telephone line and tries to alert the police. The plot structure is quite convoluted, with most of the story told in flashbacks. In fact there are flashbacks within flashbacks, making it somewhat hard to follow. The audience is supposed to feel sympathy for Stanwyck, but the character is too self-centered and whiny for that to happen. Given her character's propensity for histrionics, the actress manages to keep her performance somewhat controlled; Lancaster is fine as her trophy husband. Litvak creates a good film noir atmosphere, although at times his camera roams aimlessly, becoming a distraction.

Anatole Litvak directs the movie version of Lucille Fletcher's radio war-horse Sorry, Wrong Number was gusto and drive. The photograpy is deceptively simple at first blush, but soon evolves, giving each scene an individuality and clarity not unlike deep-focus. There's an overall feeling of gloom in this largely nocturnal movie, which is stylistically a sort of vest-pocket film noir Citizen Kane. Some of the touches border on the surreal, such as Lancaster's (among others) repeated references to his home town of Grassville, which happened at least thirty-six times and grows alternately funnier and more disturbing with each passing mention. The feel of New York in summer has seldom been so well captured in a studio-bound film, as scene upon scene appears to be enveloped in fog or cigarette smoke, and the horns of boats moving down-river or out to sea are often audible, at times suggesting, not wholly inapprpriately, the world of Eugene O'Neill and his theme of universal frustration. For all this, there is little actual movement in the film, which reflects the heroine's bed-ridden state, as scenes are acted out semi-theatrically, with characters talking to one another continuously, and whether wicked or benign seldom communicating clearly, as each little chat leaves someone more in the dark than before. The story moves, one might say, from one misinterpretation to another, until the climax, when all becomes clear, as tragedy trumps melodrama, giving the viewer a much needed jolt of reality.

As a child I was riveted by the classic radio play starring Agnes Moorehead, and here playwright Lucille Fletcher gets her chance to expand the relentless tale of what happens to wealthy. spoiled Leona Stevenson one lonely night in the heart of New York City. Harold Vermilyea is Evans, the devoted employee destroyed by her wastrel husband's greed, and Ann Richards is Sally, Leona's loyal (though we wonder why) ex-classmate. These two are the only likeable characters in SWN. Still, as the minutes tick by toward the horrific conclusion, life in the unconcerned city goes on ... roaring subways, loud conversations, and traffic sounds, all accentuating the mounting apprehensions and, eventually, our realization of the immense evil that has found Leona Stevenson.

'Sorry Wrong Number' is an exercise in how to ruin everything that worked in a tightly-written 22 minute radio play, via its transformation into a hideously-padded 90 minute movie. The play was so short as to defy the need for a star but the movie is seen as a chance to sell you Barbara Stanwyck. The idea for the play just didn't have 90 minutes in it.

The play built tension by confining listeners along with the invalid protagonist in her bedroom, which rapidly became a cage. Unfortunately it was expanded every which way until the clean machinery of the play is convoluted beyond recognition with plot, plot, plot as far as the eye can see; and secondary characters of no importance whatsoever talking the life out of things. We cut away from the room dozens of times for equally meaningless developments. There's an nightclub floor show. There's a secret chalet on a beach introduced with a clam-digging scenario. There's a chemistry lab, car trips, intrigue, sub-plots… Expanding the play just loused the whole thing up. None of it is of any quality.

It's all pointless elaboration of the weakest variety; it has no effect on the outcome. Stanwyck is just plain wrong for the role. You want to see an excellent confined, single-set movie? Rent Rear Window. This is very confused, very limp movie. A model of efficiency converted into a showcase of deficiencies.

Heck of a thriller, though the narrative is difficult to piece together at times. Stanwyck gets to run through a gamut of hysterical emotions as the intended victim. Her Leona is not particularly likable as the rich man's daughter who gets her way by bullying people around her. So there's some rough justice in her predicament—alone, disabled and dependent on the phone while a killer seemingly stalks her. Even the independent working-man, a studly Henry (Lancaster), is bullied into taking up with her. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she's got scads of money to assist her schemes. Incidentally, catch how Henry's several capitulations to others (Leona, Morano) are marked by allowing them to light his cigarette. Nice touch.

The idea of only gradually revealing why Leona is being set up for murder is a good one. It adds to the suspense—not just a 'when' but also a 'why'. The trouble is the disclosure is only revealed in pieces over the phone using flashbacks, and these are hard to piece together over a stretch of time. But enough comes through that we get the idea. There's some great noir photography from Sol Polito that really adds to the tense atmosphere. Anyhow, it's a great premise that also played well over the radio that I recall as a kid. It's also a subtle irony that one could end up being so alone in the middle of a great city. Poor Leona, maybe if she had been a little nicer and less bossy over the phone, she might have made the human connection she needed.

It's stylish, no doubt, and the ending is a remarkably shocking nail biter for its time, but "Sorry, Wrong Number" seems like an awfully overwrought affair now. Barbara Stanwyck acts up a storm as a bed-ridden woman who inadvertently hears plans for a murder over her phone and spends the rest of the film trying to get help. It's like a melodramatic, women's picture version of "When a Stranger Calls." The film is fleshed out with a lot of back story that feels more like padding than anything else, but I guess they had to fill out the run time with something, since the basic story could have been told in 15 minutes. Stanwyck handles the film like a pro. Even when she's overacting (which is often) she keeps you thoroughly interested in this rather silly affair. She would win her last Best Actress Academy Award nomination for this film, forcing the Academy to toss her a consolation honorary award over thirty years later, one more shameful oversight in the Academy's long and unmatched history of shameful oversights.

True noir lovers take note---this is not really a film noir, not in the strictest sense of that overused phrase. But it's an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.

Grade: B-

Barbara Stanwyck as a bedridden,neurotic woman who due to crossed telephone lines accidentally overhears a murder plot. As this tense thriller moves along she comes to know that it is her the murders are after.Panic arises......

This is a one-actor piece and Stanwyck carries the assignment brilliantly.As the selfish,neurotic Leona Stevenson she lets us see all of the characters frailties and her mounting fright as she becomes aware that she's to be a murder victim.Burt Lancaster has limited screentime as the husband,but he makes the most of it. A suspense film almost of the Hitchcock calibre.

Chrome-plated hokum, Sorry, Wrong Number works despite itself. And works and works. Starting out as a radio drama by Lucille Fletcher in the 1940s, it boasted umpteen performances plus a 1946 production in the nascent medium of television before Anatole Litvak turned it into film noir. During most of its earlier incarnations, Agnes Moorehead created the role of the hysterical, bedridden heiress, the `cough drop queen,' but the film fell into the lap of the First Lady of Film Noir, Barbara Stanwyck. Moorehead was more than a strong enough actress, but Hollywood required a star.

The Irony is that Sorry, Wrong Number is far from her finest hour on screen. Rarely has one been made so aware of Stanwyck `acting' in the most unabashedly actressy way. And the same can be said of Burt Lancaster who, when a role didn't set well with him, communicated his discomfort blatantly. In The Rose Tattoo, against Anna Magnani, he was ingratiating and unconvincing ; here, he's almost as awkward as the henpecked husband in whom the worm has at long last turned.

But maybe Fletcher's slice of devil's food cake calls for mannered histrionics. Ensconced in her bedchamber one sweltering Manhattan evening, her pill bottles and her telephone at her elbow, Stanwyck eavesdrops on a sinister conversation – a murder is being plotted – thanks to a crossed line. This makes her even more restive, and she starts working the phone, tracking down her tardy husband. Litvak `ventilates' these calls, turning them into a series of flashbacks filling in the background to what will prove a very bad evening for Stanwyck. (The sequences on Staten Island, however, could have sprung from the pen of Franklin W. Dixon, the Hardy Boys' puppeteer.)

Unavoidably talky, owing to its source, Sorry, Wrong Number moves inexorably to its preordained end. Basically, it's a gimmick, and one that Hitchcock might have fine-tuned into a nifty infernal machine. Litvak doesn't do badly, though, and the movie's shock value outlasts its staled conventions. Its most chilling moment comes when Stanwyck frantically dials a number that she thinks will give her solace. But her answer is `BOwery 2-1000 – the City Morgue.'

If you have never seen this film but are a fan of Barbara Stanwyck's, then have you got a treat in store! Barbara Stanwyck, in my humble opinion, never gave a better performance, and is hysterical, overbearing, and pompous all at once. Her electrifying performance, cultivating in a suspenseful scene where the hired killer walks up the stairs to her room as she watches in horror and screams to her husband over the phone for help. The other performances are less stellar, excluding maybe the man portraying Barbara's father. Also, the film lags at some points where Stanwyck is not in front. It is easy to notice that Miss Stanwyck pulls the film to its suspenseful height with her emotionally draining performance.

For her fourth and final Oscar nomination for Best Actress, Barbara Stanwyck starred in an expanded version of the Lucille Fletcher radio play Sorry Wrong Number. The original drama was only thirty minutes and it only concentrates on a crippled woman and her terror. We certainly get that in this film and it's when we do that Stanwyck went into Oscar contention.

Besides the moments of present terror, the story is fleshed in a series of flashbacks, sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks, although not approaching Passage to Marseilles which set some kind of record in that department. The people that Fletcher creates aren't the most sympathetic group of people you'd ever want to meet. Stanwyck is the spoiled only child of pharmaceutical millionaire Ed Begley and we her put on a full court campaign to sweep poor kid Burt Lancaster off his feet and away from Ann Richards. We see Lancaster trapped in a velvet cocoon of luxury, but not really being his own man. He's as kept as William Holden was in Sunset Boulevard.

As the story unfolds it actually becomes Lancaster's struggle to claw out of captivity. Stanwyck does not become the most sympathetic figure either as she wields her illness as a weapon as surely as Eleanor Parker did in The Man With The Golden Arm. Imagine Bill Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard married to Parker's from the Otto Preminger classic and you've got a really sick marriage.

The flashback story is a bit much to take, but when it comes to Stanwyck's present terror the film goes into high gear. Think of the extraordinary range of roles that Barbara Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar. The white trash mother in Stella Dallas, the mob moll in Ball Of Fire, the evil wife in Double Indemnity and finally this psychosomatic clinging cripple in Sorry Wrong Number. All completely different from the others, yet all stamped with Stanwyck's indelible screen persona.

According to the Axel Madsen biography of Stanwyck she was not entertaining hopes of winning in 1948 in what proved to be her last shot at a competitive Oscar. She picked out exactly who was going to win that year and her other competition was Ingrid Bergman in Joan Of Arc, Olivia DeHavilland in The Snake Pit, and Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama. The winner in who Stanwyck said was the Best Performance for an Actress in 1948 was Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda.

When Sorry Wrong Number concentrates on Barbara it's one of the best fright tales around. Would that the rest of the film was as good as her performance.

Just finished watching this gripping, tension-packed film noir thriller and enjoyed every moment of it. Barbara Stanwyck is superb as the spoiled rich woman trapped in her bedroom by illness and Burt Lancaster, playing against his he-man type, is great as the compromised husband who is stuck under the thumbs of his wife and her father.

As the story plays out in nearly real time, and as much of the present dialog is spoken through phone calls, I admired the way the director was able to weave in flashbacks that explain how the situation got to such a serious, deadly point. Far from bogging down the plot, they built the tension and suspense to such a point that when the shocking and perfectly abrupt ending came, all I could say was, "Wow!"

"Sorry, Wrong Number" is one radio play that should not have been adapted to the screen, unless it were a short 10 minute filler.

Part of the appeal of the radio play is the fact that we never really figure out what the killer's motives are. The film adaptation seems content with endlessly showing flashbacks within flashbacks to tell us everything that should have been left to the imagination. This results in the destruction of any suspense that has been built up. In fact, the only interesting moments of "Sorry, Wrong Number" are the scenes that were actually in the radio play.

The ending may be a bit of a shock for those who haven't read the radio play, and the last line of the film is certainly classic. If you haven't read the play, you may want to give "Sorry, Wrong Number" a watch. If you have read it, don't bother with the adaptation.

This kept my interest in the early going but almost lost me as it turns into too much of a soap opera instead of a film noir, in which it is classified.

There are some good touches film noir cinematography here and there which I enjoyed. Barbara Stanwyck, whom I usually like to watch, was nothing but a whining hypochondriac and not somebody you root for because of her constant demanding of everything. Yet, I somehow found her character at least bearable.

I did like the ending and I thought it made the film more memorable and credible.