Average Rating: 6.8/10
Reviews Counted: 21
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 3
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 2
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
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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
Jan 1, 1948 Wide
May 28, 2002
All Critics (23) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (18) | Rotten (3) | DVD (9)
Number derives sleek hysteria from its audaciously constraining narrative strategy.
To make a movie of Lucille Fletcher's classic radio play was really to betray its best idea: that sound, not sight, is the truly paranoid sense.
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.
Stanwyck was too strong to play this simpering role.
Both Lancaster and Stanwyck are excellent.
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.
Stanwyck's metamorphosis from indolence to hysteria is brilliantly executed.
dark and terrifying
Vintage suspense with terrific Stanwyck, Lancaster
Fletcher adapted her celebrated 22-minute, single-character radio play into an almost equally tense screenplay, still retaining many of the eerie sound effects.
The film’s basic premise is just too compelling to resist.
A bit drawn-out, but a sensational vehicle for Stanwyck's talents
It is a carefully plotted film that leads to an extraordinary ironic climax.
A good script, but it should have been filmed with the woman who made it famous on the stage, Agnes Moorehead.
[A] taut thriller.
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
Super Reviewer
Probably the first great telephone themed thriller ever. I highly recommend this movie.
September 5, 2010Super Reviewer
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Check out the trailer for this L.A. noir!
Behind-the-scenes Hysteria video