Sorry, Wrong Number **** (1948, Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards ) – Classic Movie Review 720

Barbara Stanwyck earned an Oscar nomination for her thrilling performance as Leona Stevenson, a paranoid, hypochondriac woman confined to her bed who accidentally overhears on the phone a conversation between two men planning to murder her in director Anatole Litvak’s 1948 classic film noir thriller.

Who can she call for help? Obviously, no one believes her, neither her friends nor the cops. Initially, she doesn’t know who the victim is, so she becomes increasingly desperate as she tries to work out who it is so the crime can be prevented. So when she does work it out, she’s in big trouble.

Burt Lancaster is very chilling as her spineless, murderous husband, who has married her for her wealth, which he needs to cash in on now as he is crippled by gambling debts and blackmail demands. And he is the husband she is waiting for to return home!

Litvak’s supremely tense, skilfully made, compulsive, claustrophobic thriller is neatly and ideally expanded by screenwriter Lucille Fletcher from her own 1943 30-minute radio play, which had starred Agnes Moorehead.

She was offered a small role in the film, but turned it down feeling insulted. Great though Stanwyck is, you can’t help wishing you could see Moorehead doing it.

The radio play proved so popular that the Suspense radio series restaged it seven times up to 1960, each production starring Moorehead. Lux Radio Theater broadcast a 60-minute radio adaptation of the movie in 1950 with Stanwyck and Lancaster reprising their roles.

Leona’s number Plaza 5-1098 was a phone company test number that always gave a busy signal when called.

Laraine Day had to turn down the star role because she was making My Dear Secretary (1948) for United Artists.

Paramount advertised it as ‘The prize-winning radio suspense drama that thrilled 40,000,000 people … now electrifies the screen!’ Can you imagine a day when 40,000,000 people were listening to drama on  the radio?

The movie is featured in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), when Chris Pine’s Ryan goes to a cinema apparently to see it but actually to meet a contact.

Remade as a TV movie in 1989 with Loni Anderson.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 720 derekwinnert.com