Simply A Masterpiece

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

One of Barbara Stanwyck's finest performances as invalid Leona Stevenson, who by chance overhears a hitman and his client over a crossed line while trying to contact her husband (Burt Lancaster). A woman is about to be killed somewhere in the vast city outside her stately dwelling and bedridden Leona has a devil of a time phoning around for anyone who will take her seriously.So sets the scene of Anatole Litvak's stylish film noir, based on the highly acclaimed play by Lucille Fletcher. The Stevenson's courtship and now shaky marriage is conveyed via a series of flashbacks involving use of the telephone itself. Gripping stuff.

This somewhat "better-than-average", 1948, Hollywood Thriller was originally a 30-minute radio play written in 1943 by Lucille Fletcher.So, with that in mind, you can just imagine how much extra padding this film's story required in order to turn it into a 90-minute vehicle for the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster.Featuring some excellent b&w camera-work, "Sorry, Wrong Number" certainly contains enough suspense and tension-filled moments to allow the viewer to forgive its decidedly convoluted storyline that (once again) gets itself bogged down with way too much "flashback" nonsense.Well, if nothing else - Being a vintage, Hollywood production, "Sorry, Wrong Number" does, at least, rise above your typical "screwball" comedy which seemed to prevail during that particular era in movie-making history.

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.

Leona Stevenson, a wealthy heiress, travels from her home in Chicago to New York to obtain medical treatment for the heart condition which has left her a bedridden invalid. She is obliged to remain in bed with the telephone as her only link to the outside world. One evening, she gets a crossed phone connection and accidentally overhears a conversation between two men who seem to be plotting a murder. This film is sometimes described as having been shot in real time, but it is very different from, say, Hitchcock's "Rope", also made in 1948. "Rope" has a simple structure, observing the classical unities of time, place and action; the action not only takes place in real time but also takes place in a single location and tells a single story, with no subplots and no flashbacks. In "Sorry, Wrong Number" the main plot line, taking place in Leona's bedroom, may take place in real time, but there are also numerous flashbacks. These all occur in the context of a telephone conversation between Leona and some other person, and they relate what has happened in the past or what is happening in some other place. One such flashback, for example, tells the story of how Leona met and married her husband Henry, whom she seduced away from her college friend Sally. For a film which lasts for less than an hour and a half, the plot is a fairly complex one; in its complexity and its use of flashbacks it reminded me of another American drama from the late forties, John Brahm's "The Locket". Much of the drama surrounds Henry, an uneducated but ambitious young man from a working-class background. After his marriage to Leona, he was made a vice-president of the company controlled by her wealthy father. He soon realised, however, that this job was little more than a sinecure, and his marriage to the spoiled, demanding Leona quickly went sour, especially after her illness left her an invalid. Bored and restless, he concocted a dishonest scheme to siphon off money from the company, a scheme which led to his becoming dangerously involved with a ruthless organised crime gang. Some have complained that Burt Lancaster is miscast as Henry, although I suspect that is because they think of him either as the action hero of the fifties or as the socially liberal Hollywood heavyweight of the sixties and seventies. In the early part of his career in the late forties, however, he tended to specialise in crime dramas and film noir, the best-known example probably being his debut film "The Killers". Henry is therefore typical of the sort of role that Lancaster was playing around this time, and his performance is a perfectly good one. One of the problems with the film is the lack of any characters with whom the audience can sympathise. Henry and his associates are obvious villains, and Leona is so spoiled, wilful and hysterical that she forfeits the sympathy we would normally feel for her because of her illness. (It is, in fact, revealed that there is nothing organically wrong with her heart; her symptoms are purely psychosomatic ones arising from her neuroses). Barbara Stanwyck's performance is, technically, a good one- it won her a "Best Actress" Oscar nomination- but I felt that the film could have been improved if Stanwyck had toned things down and tried to make her character more likable. Another weakness arises from the structure of the plot. Because the various flashbacks are related to Leona's various telephone conversations, there are occasions when the people she is speaking to tell her far more information than they would have been likely to do in real life, which occasionally makes the film seem rather unrealistic. Another plot hole comes when Sally's husband Fred, a lawyer with the DA's office, has a sensitive and confidential conversation with a colleague from his own home telephone in the full hearing of his wife. It struck me as highly unlikely that he would have done this, especially as the conversation concerned his wife's ex-boyfriend Henry, who is under investigation by the police. Nevertheless, director Anatole Litvak handles his material well, making use of typical film noir conventions such as low-level lighting, looming shadows and circling camera shots, as well as a spooky musical score (even if this occasionally becomes a bit too intrusive). The final scene, after Leona has come to realise that the murder she has overheard being discussed is her own, is unbearably tense. Overall, "Sorry, Wrong Number" is a very effective piece of suspense, reminiscent of some of Hitchcock's works. 7/10