Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) [Archive]

Martin

02-03-2010, 01:45 PM

Barbara Stanwyck is a bedridden heiress who overhears the planned murder of an unidentified woman on a crossed telephone line. A particularly pleasing and unusual noir in which the descent into a personal hell takes place not on dark rainy mean streets, but in an uptown penthouse bedroom, as Stanwyck's character systematically learns the truth about her husband, Burt Lancaster, through a series of increasingly disturbing and disparate telephone calls.

Stanwyck chews the scenery with aplomb, however her grandiose and over the top performance works extremely well against the various subdued and revealing telephone "flashbacks" in which she learns of her husband's shady drug related business deals and his involvement with gangsters, each expose leading to a particularly terrible realisation in the denouement.

The atmospheric camera work by Sol Polito gives the film an increasingly nightmarish feel as the plot unfolds, bringing to the interior set of the bedroom and the adjacent sweeping staircase an almost surreal haze, as curtains blow wildly and a fluid camera dizzily pulls from landing to landing in shots that skip from pools of almost absolute darkness to revealing shafts of light, beautiful cinematography which is complemented by a gut wrenching crescendo reaching score by the great film composer pioneer, Franz Waxman, his taut and tense orchestration bringing an almost unbearable finale to the film's suspense filled story line.

Sorry, Wrong Number is a gem of a late 40s thriller that pairs a cleverly scripted plot to a group of studio film-makers at the height of their skills, and is certainly to be recommended as a less obvious noir.

Steve-O

02-03-2010, 01:57 PM

Thanks for that review Martin! Here's the NOTW I wrote a while back as well as a trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDLfDfr4GIU

Sorry, Wrong Number was originally a half-hour radio script written by Lucille Fletcher. It was a huge hit. Agnes Moorehead performed the drama to radio-listening audiences seven times from 1943 to 1948. The story had such a strong following, Fletcher fleshed out the tale and turned it into a best-selling novel and later the script for the classic film noir.

Unlike the radio drama – which was a virtual monologue by Moorehead – the film uses flashbacks to flesh out the story. As mentioned in Silver and Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American style the stretched-out story ends up taking away a lot of the suspense the radio drama sustained for it's 30 minutes, but the film does capture a sense of entrapment often felt in film noir.

In addition to the flashbacks the second notable difference between the radio drama and the Gothic melodrama is the casting of the bedridden Leona Stevenson. Moorehead is one hell of an actress not only on radio but in film. In addition to her classic role in The Magnificent Ambersons, her strong supporting role in movies like Dark Passage made her one of best secondary actors of the 40s. Moorehead, however, wasn't a leading lady. Station West director Sidney Lanfield went so far as to call her “hatchet face”. I imagine producer Hal B. Wallis felt the hugely popular radio story needed a bigger star for the movie so he got one of the biggest - Barbara Stanwyck. If Bogart was the king of noir, then surely Stanwyck was the queen. Her powerful presence on screen made her the ultimate black widow in noir. Stanwyck's performance in Sorry, Wrong Number is so powerful the audience sympathy – unlike the radio drama - actually shifts to her not-so-bright would-be-killer husband played by the miscast Burt Lancaster.

The story begins in Leona Stevenson's gruesomely lavish bedroom. Stevenson, decked out in full makeup and lace, is a wealthy New York heiress. A recent invalid, she's confined to a wheelchair. That night she's left alone in her room in her elegant bed with only a telephone to connect her to the outside world. The servants are away and she's left trapped in the huge house. She tries repeatedly to contact her husband at his office, but keeps getting a busy signal. Finally Stevenson finds herself connected but she quickly realizes that she's listening to someone else's phone call. She hears two men talking about killing a woman somewhere in the city that night. She hangs up and calls back the operator and the police trying to report the planned murder. She's ignored. Desperate to hear from her husband, she finally receives a call. Unfortunately, it's from her millionaire father calling to see if she'll move back in with him. Stevenson tries to tell the pharmaceutical king about the strange call earlier. Even her rich father doesn't take the call seriously. Stevenson gets even more frantic in her efforts to talk to her missing husband. Working the phone to try to get anyone that will listen, Stevenson gets in contact with her husband's secretary who tells her about a mysterious beautiful woman who visited his office earlier in the day. With these phone calls, a series of flashbacks gradually reveal the events of the past leading up to the present day. It soon become obvious that it's her henpecked husband that wants her dead in an attempt to inherit her estate to pay off a blackmailer. Fear envelopes the woman when she realizes the conversation she heard earlier in the night was not about an unknown woman being killed but herself.

As mentioned earlier, the film does capture a sense of entrapment. Stevenson never talks to anyone face to face until the fatal ending. She's trapped in her room – that she obviously doesn't share with her husband- that's overly decorated with frilly stuff and a giant painting of her father. Director Anatole Litvak cleverly uses flashbacks (aside from the voice-over, the flashback is the most distinctive device in film noir) not only to flesh out the story but to make the woman feel more isolated. There's a palpable sense of claustrophobia whenever the view is left alone with Leona.

Leona Stevenson's father, doctor, and husband's old flame all get on the phone and tell tales that lead to flashbacks going as far back as Leona “the Cough Drop Queen” Stevenson's college years. As J. P. Telotte writes in Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Pattern of Film Noir: in multiplying narrators and viewpoints a film like Sorry, Wrong Number it unleashes a nightmare of potential that always haunts the noir world – the potential of ambiguity, of multiple, indeterminate meanings, and of a self that is subject to unseen, unsensed forces.

With the help of these flashbacks we find about a number of important things in Leona Stevenson's life. Her husband is a knucklehead for one. Played by Burt Lancaster (who made his film debut two years earlier in The Killers), Henry Stevenson is a weak minded guy from the sticks. He's stolen from his sweetheart by the manipulating Leona at a school dance and eventually marries her. He's made a vice president of her father's company but is miserable. James Cotterell hates his son-in-law and makes Henry unhappy. He's so unhappy and tired of feeling used by his wife and father-in-law that he starts stealing goods from the company. That eventually leads to mobsters swooping in and taking what Henry stole. Henry, in a pinch, arranges to have his wife killed to collect her estate. Lancaster is young and good looking in the role but I have a hard time believing he'd be so manipulated by everyone around him. Some will say that he adds some verisimilitude to the proceedings – especially since Stanwyck is so over the top – but I disagree.

Leona Stevenson's father James Cotterell is played by the wonderful noir regular Ed Begley. He, like his daughter is a control freak. His home office is filled wall-to-wall with trophies from hunting trips. Mixed in with all the stuffed dead animals are pictures and paintings of his beloved daughter Leona. He clearly wants to control her and keep her. It's revealed later in the film (by the family doctor played by Stanwyck's future File on Thelma Jordon co-star Wendell Corey) that Leona suffers from a bad heart that made her an invalid as a child and again after her husband tried to stand up to her. Even more interesting is the fact that nothing is psychically wrong with the woman's heart. It's all in her head. I have no doubt that Leona's father is manipulated by his daughter using that illness as much as her husband is.

The film is filled with coincidences. For one, what are the chances that someone would hear a crossed-lined call from somewhere in the city where the talkers would actually be talking about them? The other big coincidence is the fact that Henry's old flame (Sally Hunt Lord played by Ann Richards) who visits him earlier in the evening is actually married to the city district attorney that is investigating Henry. Luckily – but a little too late – for Leona that these two events happen. Otherwise she'd be totally in the dark about her planned killing. Of course maybe it's fate that's making these coincidences happen. Was it possibly done in an attempt to make a miserable woman fearful in her last hours?

I found the film hard to warm up to at first. There isn't a likable character in the whole movie. As I mentioned, Leona is so strong a character that I tend to root for her husband to get away with it all. I also can't help but think of the clips of an hysterical Stanwyck edited into Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid whenever I see this movie. Those scenes of her just losing it out of the context of the original film are just plain funny. I think I like the movie more now than I did a few years ago thanks to some fine supporting role players. In addition to the leads, William Conrad (one of Lancaster's Killers) and Wendell Corey (wonderfully drunk in The File on Thelma Jordon) always are welcome in any film I watch.

Finally, the appropriately bombastic score by Franz Waxman and the claustrophobic cinematography by director of photography Sol Polito make Sorry, Wrong Number a slick big budget drama that can stand alone from the hugely popular radio play.