Sorry, Wrong Number

“You’re right in the heart of New York City and there’s a telephone next to your bed.” These words spoken over the phone to Lenora Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) by her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) are intended as comfort, but instead they encapsulate the danger in Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number. Based on a hit radio play by Lucille Fletcher, Litvak’s film creates terrifying claustrophobia in an enormous, empty Manhattan brownstone which traps the disabled Lenora like a sitting duck for the hit men arriving any minute. Having overheard a telephone conversation plotting her murder, she desperately reaches out to anyone who might know where her husband is, most helpfully Henry’s former girlfriend Sally Hunt (Ann Richards) whose husband, Lenora soon learns, works in the district attorney’s office and has been investigating Henry’s criminal ties. Effectively heightening Lenora’s alienation (and occasionally providing indirect exposition), Polito’s constantly floating camera moves slowly downstairs, searchingly across rooms, even out Lenora’s bedroom window and down the side of her building to a shadowy figure breaking in. Also note the hazy, surreal flashbacks on a beach in Staten Island where Sally tails her husband and his associates; the low-contrast dreaminess brings Sally’s reliability as narrator into doubt. Stanwyck is fantastic as the selfish, entitled daughter of pharmaceutical tycoon James Cotterell (Ed Begley), her performance reaching a thrilling crescendo as her fate closes in.