When Lucille Fletcher took on the challenge of expanding her classic 30-minute radio suspenser Sorry, Wrong Number into an 89-minute feature film, she opted on the Citizen Kane approach, filling the plotline to the brim with revelatory flashbacks. Barbara Stanwyck stars as bedridden hypochondriac Leona Stevenson, who while trying to make a call from her bedroom telephone gets her wires crossed and inadvertently overhears two men plotting a murder. Anxiously, Leona wades through telephone-company
bureaucracy to trace the call, never catching on -- until it's too late -- that the murder being planned is hers. A series of flashbacks details the disintegrating marriage between the wealthy Leona and her weakling husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), and Henry's subsequent disastrous get-rich-quick schemes involving chemist Waldo Evans (Harold Vermilyea) and a surly gangster (William Conrad). It would have been a near-sacrilege to alter the radio play's ironic ending, which fortunately remains intact on film. Sorry Wrong Number was first heard on radio's Suspense series in 1943, with Agnes Moorehead as the harried Mrs. Stevenson (a role she'd repeat several times on radio and on stage). Though disappointed that she wasn't chosen to star in the film version, Moorehead took some satisfaction in the fact that a recording of the original radio program was played constantly on the set to help keep Barbara Stanwyck "in the mood". ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Perhaps if you have a special interest in foul folks and morbidities, you will thrill to this Hal Wallis picture. Frankly, we squirmed -- and not from dread.
Anatole Litvak's taut, gripping, highly stylized noir, based a 22 minute radio play with Agnes Moorehead, is one of the genre's very best, with a bed-ridden Stanwyck in a tour de force performance--a case study for lover of film noir.
Fletcher adapted her celebrated 22-minute, single-character radio play into an almost equally tense screenplay, still retaining many of the eerie sound effects.
I spent the first 86 minutes hoping Barbara Stanwyck would get what's coming to her and the last 3 minutes praying she'd escape. What a sensational screenplay (à la Lucille Fletcher)!
January 18, 2009
Randy Tippy
Super Reviewer
Probably the first great telephone themed thriller ever. I highly recommend this movie.
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