This late-40s dramatic thriller is rich in both deep characterization and tension-filled suspense.
Very few fans of classic suspense tales will not have heard of Lucille Fletcher’s masterpiece Sorry, Wrong Number. The classic radio play became a staple for the medium mainly due to how it displayed tension in ways never thought of before. Orson Welles reportedly called it “the single greatest radio script ever written” and in 2015, Sorry, Wrong Number was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. For her part, Fletcher enjoyed the success what would become her most defining work. The popularity of her creation allowed her to bring Sorry, Wrong Number to both theater stages and bookshelves whereby the story’s plot was greatly expanded. However, despite its legacy as a brilliant radio drama, it’s the 1948 film version starring Barbara Stanwyck which remains the most effective.
In Sorry, Wrong Number, Stanwyck stars as Leona Stevenson, the rich heiress to a drug store empire. Alone and bedridden in her Manhattan townhouse, Leona is getting impatient waiting for her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) to come home from work. After repeated attempts to contact his office go nowhere, Leona finally has the operator dial for her. When she is cut into another phone call due to crossed wires, Leona overhears plans for a murder to be carried out at 11:15 that night. With the police proving no help at all and Leona unable to leave her bed, the wealthy invalid proceeds to do everything she can to stop the murder from taking place with only a telephone as her aid.
Made as the days of the genre were beginning to slow down slightly, Sorry, Wrong Number is pure film noir at its finest. Director Anatole Litvak has draped his film in a haze of physical darkness. Even scenes which take place in daylight, including a highly intriguing sequence on the sun-drenched beach at Staten Island carries a dark hue. The many uses of shadows throughout the film are both beautiful and haunting, making themselves present in virtually every other scene and greatly showing their power and vitality as a key component of the genre. As with most noirs, Sorry, Wrong Number is loaded with flashbacks, and at one point even flashbacks within flashbacks from Henry and Leona’s courtship, to the recollection given from every person our bedridden heroine telephones in search of her husband. However the film goes further and turns the genre on its head a bit in terms of role reversals. Leona is essentially the amateur detective of the piece (a role typically taken by male characters), using every bit of information she can gather to not only try and stop a murder from taking place, but also to discover what has happened to her husband, who in turn, one might say adopts the role of femme fatale.
As Sorry, Wrong Number was a Barbara Stanwyck movie from the late 1940s, it comes as no surprise that there should be a good amount of melodrama to be found within it. However while most melodrama seen in films of the time was more on the sudsier side, in Sorry, Wrong Number there’s a good amount of psychology attached to the characters and their tumultuous marriage. The blue collar Henry is a diamond in the rough in Leona’s eyes when she finds him. Her attempts at trying to sculpt him into the mold she thinks he should be has the determined and beguiling Leona emasculating him at virtually every turn. Anytime Henry dares to make a move that’s of his own accord, Leona lashes out, eventually becoming physically ill. When the condition which has her bedridden is discovered to be psychosomatic, stemming from a fear of abandonment following her mother’s death just after she was born, she refuses to believe it. And yet it isn’t just this revelation that sets Leona off, it’s also the knowledge that it was she who chased after Henry, not the other way around. She went after the man she wanted, but perhaps never truly felt she got him and has spent the duration of their marriage continuously doubting Henry’s love.
In Henry’s case, there is a prime example of a man feeling like a caged animal. Having grown up earning everything he had, he accepts his role as Leona’s trophy husband, but desperately wants the chance to make a name for himself through his own merit. Yet every time he makes an attempt to give Leona a life they can truly both call their own, he’s shot down by her. While most men of his generation are able to earn their name and standing, Henry finds himself feeling stifled with love and control from a wife who has never wanted for anything and has never been told no. Henry insists he loves Leona, but there’s no doubt he also finds himself being driven mad by her. It is for this reason that Henry enters into a dangerous enterprise behind Leona’s back out of a desperate need for validation; a need which ultimately costs him everything.
Not to take away from all of the other classic performances which earned Stanwyck her name and reputation as “the best actress who never won an Oscar,” but her work in Sorry, Wrong Number is downright phenomenal. The actress more than brings out Leona’s hunger and passion in the flashback scenes with the greatest of skill. However, it’s the long stretches of her in bed as she races against the clock which make the film as explosive as it is. With no acting partner anywhere in sight during these scenes, almost all of the film’s weight falls squarely on Stanwyck’s shoulders. The actress takes full advantage as she shows Leona’s many sides beginning with frustration and worry and ending with the utmost fear and terror. The moment in which the two plots converge is one of the film’s most breathtaking scenes and is made even better by one of the finest acting moments Stanwyck ever gave to the camera. It’s a fantastic tour-de-force performance, earning the actress her final Oscar nomination while remaining a marvel to behold today.
It would be easy for most actors to get lost in the shadows of such an electrifying co-star, yet Lancaster wasn’t like most actors. With only a few titles to his name at the time, Lancaster may not have been as seasoned as Stanwyck, but he was accomplished enough to explore Henry as a character with true dimension. In his hands, Henry is someone whom life chewed up and spit out repeatedly. The moment in which he describes his mother’s death is full of deep melancholy, while anguish dominates his final moments on the screen as he’s now the one who is clutching a telephone receiver for dear life. Sorry, Wrong Number is largely Stanwyck’s show, but it wouldn’t have the same kind of power it does without the considerable talents of its leading man.
One of the reasons Sorry, Wrong Number was such an intense experience both then and now was due to shockingness of its ending. Most films of the day typically ended on somewhat upbeat notes, albeit on different levels. Even noirs and dark dramas featured conclusions which didn’t have to be “happy” as long as they were right in terms of story and character. Sorry, Wrong Number dared to go against the current by offering up an ending in which there are no winners and ultimately, no peace. In many ways, the ending of Sorry, Wrong Number is in keeping with the social attitudes of the day and its treatment towards women who were seen to be domineering. Yet the beauty of the ending is its explosion of all the slow-boiling suspense felt from the start. There’s so much excruciating tension in the final minutes of Sorry, Wrong Number in which our heroine is trapped with no one to save her. It is truly a culmination of the drama, emotion, and terror which has come before and the reason the film remains a prime example of noir storytelling to this day.
