Anatole Litvak (1948)
At eighty-nine minutes, Sorry, Wrong Number isn’t a long feature film but it’s four times the length of its source material, a radio play of the same name, first broadcast in 1943 – a ‘famous radio play’; according to the opening credits, written by Lucille Fletcher, who also did the screenplay for Anatole Litvak’s picture. Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), a highly-strung, bedridden heiress, is trying to make telephone contact with her husband Henry, who, unexpectedly, hasn’t yet returned home. The servants have the night off and Leona is alone in her house in Manhattan. She gets a crossed line and listens to two male voices discussing the murder of a woman that will be carried out in a few hours’ time. A series of subsequent phone conversations with other callers convince Leona that she is the intended victim of the murder plot. Neurotic she may be but she’s eventually proved right.
Except for the last few seconds, Lucille Fletcher’s original (available on YouTube) consists entirely of Mrs Stevenson’s phone conversations. With the New York Police Department, to report what she’s heard on the crossed line and how it’s upset her; with Western Union, who transmit a telegram from her absent husband; with a hospital from whom she tries and fails to get an emergency nurse for the night. And especially with telephone operators: the tension of the piece depends largely on the contrast between the nagging, increasingly hysterical tones of the protagonist (played by Agnes Moorehead) and the operators’ unnerving robotic calm. At the very end of the play, Mrs Stevenson’s killer is heard answering a call to her phone from the police. He delivers the ‘Sorry, wrong number’ punchline and confirms that everything’s fine. No other voices feature and there’s no background to speak of on the Stevensons’ marriage etc. The filmmakers clearly are keen to preserve the compressed timeframe and claustrophobia of the radio play and they succeed to a limited extent. For example, even though the ominous quality of the phone operators is diluted by their not being faceless in the movie, their relentless chirpy competence still imparts to their voices an increasingly mocking quality. But by adding numerous other characters and a ton of backstory, Anatole Litvak and Lucille Fletcher sacrifice a lot – including, for a fair amount of the time, Barbara Stanwyck.
Sorry, Wrong Number (with cinematography by Sol Polito and music by Franz Waxman) announces its noir credentials immediately. The first sequences, focusing exclusively on Stanwyck’s overbearing, entitled Leona, are atmospheric. The director and his star build a sense of Leona’s irritable agitation and of stifling New York heat, even with the bedroom windows open to the darkening Manhattan skyline. The narrative shape and rhythm start to change when Leona makes contact with Henry’s secretary Miss Jennings (Dorothy Neumann), who says that Mr Stevenson took an attractive young woman out to lunch and didn’t return to work. This news comes complete with flashback to the office earlier in the day, and Henry (Burt Lancaster)’s reaction to the appearance there of said young woman (Ann Richards), whose name is Sally and who is revealed to be Henry’s ex-girlfriend, from whom Leona stole him.
It’s not long before Sally phones Leona with a lengthy description of how the lawyer to whom she’s now married has been carrying out an investigation that somehow involves Henry. Sally describes how she followed her husband and his associates in the district attorney’s office to a deserted house on Staten Island belonging to a man called Waldo Evans, a chemist who works for Leona’s rich industrialist father James Cotterell. In due course, Evans (Harold Vermilyea) is also calling Leona, with an even longer account of Henry’s (and, at Henry’s instigation, Evans’s own) wrongdoings. The backstory is cumbersome and clumsy.
As a phone interlocutor, Leona is reliably impatient and unwilling to let the voice on the other end have its say – so the sequences showing Sally and Waldo Evans speaking into the mouthpiece without a sound of interruption are unconvincing, as well as unexciting to watch. For both these reasons presumably, Litvak sticks to the pattern established by Miss Jennings’s recollection: events and conversations recounted to Leona over the phone are largely shown on screen. But this inevitably robs the film of the radio play’s formal distinctiveness – without there being anything to replace it. Besides, whether the description of events leading up to the murder plot is purely verbal or in the form of dramatised flashback, it nearly always removes Barbara Stanwyck from the action. Her impact has been so strong that, when Leona is invisible and silent for any length of time, it feels that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the telling of the story.
The ‘nearly always’ above is because Stanwyck does feature in flashbacks illustrating the state of the Stevensons’ marriage, in which Leona is domineering and Henry virtually powerless. James Cotterell (Ed Begley) didn’t want his daughter to marry drugstore-employee Henry. Used to getting her own way, Leona ignored her father’s wishes but, once married, has continued to see those wishes as more important than anyone else’s except her own. Henry, for his part, wed Leona without knowing about her chronic ill health (serious heart condition) or realising how humiliating he would find his sinecure in Cotterell’s company. The combination of Burt Lancaster’s potent physical presence and the weakness of Henry’s position is one of the more effective elements of the film. So is Ed Begley: in spite of being Stanwyck’s senior by only six years (and Lancaster’s by twelve), he’s credibly a generation older. The flashbacks to earlier in the couple’s relationship, although they present the marital dynamic crudely, register too – simply because they give Barbara Stanwyck the opportunity fully to interact with another actor. This is an essential part of her artistry and seeing it in action underlines what you’re missing in the scenes where Leona is alone on the screen, wholeheartedly though Stanwyck plays these.
This was probably the third time I’d seen Sorry, Wrong Number. The first was on television, several decades ago; the second, like this latest viewing, was at BFI, around twelve years back. All I remember of the first time is the scary shock of the ending but that’s a clue to how powerful an experience the film can be as an unknown quantity. Leona Stevenson is a highly unsympathetic character – monotonously self-centred, humourless, a doubly faint-hearted bully. She’s consistently the centre of the audience’s attention, though; at some level you expect her to be successfully extricated from a situation that is unarguably suspenseful. As a contrite Henry calls Leona long-distance, shortly before the shadow of her killer makes its way up the staircase in Manhattan, police officers stand by the phone booth, apparently ready to make an arrest. On this occasion, however, the bringing to justice of a guilty party doesn’t help a prospective victim. If you’re a newcomer to the movie, the finale is likely to be startling: you suddenly realise Leona isn’t going to be saved, really is going to die. The fact that you don’t forget this weakens the film when you go back to it, though. When you’re no longer anxiously preoccupied with how things will turn out, you see Sorry, Wrong Number for what it is, which is no great shakes.
19 March 2019
