I think that Sorry, Wrong Number and I had a bad connection - not that I was ever tempted to hang up.Director Anatole Litvak adapts Lucille Fletcher's classic radio drama into a 90-minute thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck as the bedridden Leona Stevenson-Cotterell, who overhears a telephone conversation in which two mysterious men plot the murder of an innocent woman. The premise seems simple, but in true film noir tradition there is more than meets the eye when it comes to the secrets that Leona and her mysteriously absent husband (Burt Lancaster) are keeping. Through a series of phone calls (and flashbacks), the awful truth comes out.
I'll freely admit that I hadn't heard the radio play before watching this movie. (Prep work isn't exactly my forte when it comes to this site, loyal reader.) So I was coming into this one fresh, ready for a film noir twist but also prepared to play along until the ending happened. This isn't the best noir out there - I'm a devout fan of The Big Sleep, mystifying though much of it is - but Litvak does an adequate job of keeping the movie going while not losing sight of the urgency of the murder to be committed at 11:15. It's not much of a mystery, true, but the why is more important (and more surprising) than the who and what.
Stanwyck and Lancaster are serviceable in their roles as the not-so-happily married couple, though at times Stanwyck borders on overacting (though she does a fine job of creating a simultaneously sympathetic and loathsome heiress) while Lancaster underplays what should be a more devastated part. As items submitted from the 1940s, though, and from a genre that highly prizes stylization, this is to be expected and so does not detract from the overall enjoyment of the picture.
What does, sadly, hurt Sorry, Wrong Number is that it is a touch too long. Some of the flashback scenes overstay their welcome, unnecessarily belaboring a few points (such as the courtship or the chemist's dream of owning horses). Perhaps this is the fault of the script, adapted from a nonvisual medium, or perhaps this is the fault of Litvak, who fails to yell "Cut!" when scenes run overlong. In the hands of, say, Hitchcock, this one might have been a ballpark favorite (I'll have to have a look at Dial M for Murder now to see what Hitch does with a similar premise), but as it stands, a few lines get crossed with Sorry, Wrong Number.
That said, if you can make it through a moderately drawn-out initial 70 minutes, the last 20 minutes - in which the reality behind the overheard phone call is revealed and its staggering consequences play out in brutal real time - are solid gold. In top film noir tradition, the film's final reel makes brilliant use of shadows, shouting, and snappy cuts to build a white-knuckle tension and a staggering climax we all saw coming but hoped wasn't so. That's the genius, I suppose, of the film - like The Taking of Pelham 123, Sorry, Wrong Number did a bang-up job of convincing me how it wouldn't end... and then ended just like it was supposed to. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
It's like a great dessert after an okay main course.
I'll freely admit that I hadn't heard the radio play before watching this movie. (Prep work isn't exactly my forte when it comes to this site, loyal reader.) So I was coming into this one fresh, ready for a film noir twist but also prepared to play along until the ending happened. This isn't the best noir out there - I'm a devout fan of The Big Sleep, mystifying though much of it is - but Litvak does an adequate job of keeping the movie going while not losing sight of the urgency of the murder to be committed at 11:15. It's not much of a mystery, true, but the why is more important (and more surprising) than the who and what.
Stanwyck and Lancaster are serviceable in their roles as the not-so-happily married couple, though at times Stanwyck borders on overacting (though she does a fine job of creating a simultaneously sympathetic and loathsome heiress) while Lancaster underplays what should be a more devastated part. As items submitted from the 1940s, though, and from a genre that highly prizes stylization, this is to be expected and so does not detract from the overall enjoyment of the picture.
What does, sadly, hurt Sorry, Wrong Number is that it is a touch too long. Some of the flashback scenes overstay their welcome, unnecessarily belaboring a few points (such as the courtship or the chemist's dream of owning horses). Perhaps this is the fault of the script, adapted from a nonvisual medium, or perhaps this is the fault of Litvak, who fails to yell "Cut!" when scenes run overlong. In the hands of, say, Hitchcock, this one might have been a ballpark favorite (I'll have to have a look at Dial M for Murder now to see what Hitch does with a similar premise), but as it stands, a few lines get crossed with Sorry, Wrong Number.
That said, if you can make it through a moderately drawn-out initial 70 minutes, the last 20 minutes - in which the reality behind the overheard phone call is revealed and its staggering consequences play out in brutal real time - are solid gold. In top film noir tradition, the film's final reel makes brilliant use of shadows, shouting, and snappy cuts to build a white-knuckle tension and a staggering climax we all saw coming but hoped wasn't so. That's the genius, I suppose, of the film - like The Taking of Pelham 123, Sorry, Wrong Number did a bang-up job of convincing me how it wouldn't end... and then ended just like it was supposed to. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
It's like a great dessert after an okay main course.
Sorry, Wrong Number made it to theaters before the MPAA carved out their ratings stamps, but this is definitely PG fare. As a 40s flick, this one is fairly innocuous, without any on-screen violence - the tension and the action is all in your head.
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