Post by petrolino on Jan 28, 2018 0:50:08 GMT
'Sorry, Wrong Number' is a crime thriller based on a radio play by scriptwriter Lucille Fletcher. Bedridden heiress Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) is at home alone when she's connected to a phone call outlining the plot for a possible murder. Leona reports this to the operator and the police but nobody seems willing to investigate.
'Sorry, Wrong Number' is an intricate mystery that's loaded with important dialogue and forced confessions. Director Anatole Litvak absorbs elements of the semi-documentary thrillers and docu-noirs pioneered by Henry Hathaway in the 1940s, combining these aspects with classical filmmaking and some nifty theatrical devices to create an interesting brew. Litvak also employs prop sounds and sound effect timers in an effort to heighten suspense, while his cinematographer Sol Polito triggers a subtle, solitary, circling camera to define some of the action, allowing Litvak to craft a shifting narrative by adopting multi-purpose technical aspects. The forceful orchestral backing contributed by composer Franz Waxman is another notable aspect.
'Sorry, Wrong Number' is a garland studio production with a difference. From Chicago to Cicero, a shadow world in Illinois is uncovered via phone conversations and flashbacks as this elegant, erudite thriller gently unravels its secrets. The climax offers what Wes Craven used to call "a delicious scare", crowd-pleasing suspense leading to a big juicy pay-off. It's not a particularly suspenseful film because the convoluted writing in many way prohibits this but 'Sorry, Wrong Number' becomes an effective thriller whenever it takes to the streets.
"Lucille Fletcher's stories and screenplays chilled at least three generations of filmgoers and television viewers over the course of a career that carried her from a clerk typist's job in New York radio to the life of a successful screenwriter in Hollywood. Born in Brooklyn, Fletcher had the goal from childhood of becoming a writer. She attended Vassar, where she was a rival and friend of future author Mary McCarthy. Fletcher was hired by the CBS network in the early '30s as a typist, music librarian, and publicity copy writer. She also made the acquaintance at CBS of conductor/composer Bernard Herrmann, whom she married in 1939. By then, she'd decided to try writing radio scripts herself, and it was while Fletcher and Herrmann were traveling West by car that she found the inspiration -- in an odd looking man whom she passed hitchhiking twice on the trip -- for one of her two most well-known scripts, The Hitchhiker."
- Bruce Eder, Fandango
Barbara Stanwyck & Burt Lancaster
- Bruce Eder, Fandango
Barbara Stanwyck & Burt Lancaster
'Sorry, Wrong Number' is an intricate mystery that's loaded with important dialogue and forced confessions. Director Anatole Litvak absorbs elements of the semi-documentary thrillers and docu-noirs pioneered by Henry Hathaway in the 1940s, combining these aspects with classical filmmaking and some nifty theatrical devices to create an interesting brew. Litvak also employs prop sounds and sound effect timers in an effort to heighten suspense, while his cinematographer Sol Polito triggers a subtle, solitary, circling camera to define some of the action, allowing Litvak to craft a shifting narrative by adopting multi-purpose technical aspects. The forceful orchestral backing contributed by composer Franz Waxman is another notable aspect.
"His movies not only reflected his background as a cosmopolitan operative who had worked in Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the United States but also his flair for handling varied themes, including romantic, psychological, historic and, on occasion, comic subjects. Anatole Litvak, who was born in Kiev on May 21, 1902, made his acting debut in an avantgarde theater in Leningrad at the age of 14. “I would have stayed,” he once said, “If that little theater had not been nationalized and transformed into an immense place absolutely unsuited for being an experimental theater. It was at that time that I chose cinema.” His first opportunity as a director came in 1923 at Leningrad's Nordkino Studio with a short feature, “Tatiana,” which he described simply as a film about kids.” After several other short films at that studio he left in 1925 for Germany, where he helped edit the Greta Garbo feature, “Streets, of Sorrow” that had been directed by G. W. Pabst."
- A.H. Weiler, The New York Times
- A.H. Weiler, The New York Times
"Unlike the radio drama – which was a virtual monologue by Agnes Moorehead – the film uses flashbacks to flesh out the story. As mentioned in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's 'Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style', the stretched-out story ends up taking away a lot of the suspense the radio drama sustained for it's 30 minutes, but the film does capture a sense of entrapment often felt in film noir. In addition to the flashbacks the second notable difference between the radio drama and the Gothic melodrama is the casting of the bedridden Leona Stevenson. Moorehead is one hell of an actress not only on radio but in film. In addition to her classic role in The Magnificent Ambersons, her strong supporting role in movies like Dark Passage made her one of best secondary actors of the 40s. Moorehead, however, wasn't a leading lady. Station West director Sidney Lanfield went so far as to call her “hatchet face”. I imagine producer Hal B. Wallis felt the hugely popular radio story needed a bigger star for the movie so he got one of the biggest - Barbara Stanwyck. If Bogart was the king of noir, then surely Stanwyck was the queen. Her powerful presence on screen made her the ultimate black widow in noir. Stanwyck's performance in Sorry, Wrong Number is so powerful the audience sympathy – unlike the radio drama - actually shifts to her not-so-bright would-be-killer husband played by the miscast Burt Lancaster."
- Steve-O, Film Noir Of The Week
"The moral of "Sorry, Wrong Number," which came to the Paramount yesterday, is that you should never leave a woman alone in a house with a telephone, especially if the woman is a nervous, excitable type. For, according to this demonstration, she can drive herself stark staring mad by an excessive utilization of that innocent little machine. And the impulse to reckless telephoning may be just too hard to overcome—especially if one gets the notion that one's husband has an urge to do one in. Hand it to Lucille Fletcher, who wrote this picture's script from her own popular radio drama, played many times, we are told: she has certainly conceived an unusual device for unfolding a plot."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
Anatole Litvak, Olivia De Havilland & John Garfield
- Steve-O, Film Noir Of The Week
"The moral of "Sorry, Wrong Number," which came to the Paramount yesterday, is that you should never leave a woman alone in a house with a telephone, especially if the woman is a nervous, excitable type. For, according to this demonstration, she can drive herself stark staring mad by an excessive utilization of that innocent little machine. And the impulse to reckless telephoning may be just too hard to overcome—especially if one gets the notion that one's husband has an urge to do one in. Hand it to Lucille Fletcher, who wrote this picture's script from her own popular radio drama, played many times, we are told: she has certainly conceived an unusual device for unfolding a plot."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
Anatole Litvak, Olivia De Havilland & John Garfield
'Motorcade' - Magazine
'Sorry, Wrong Number' is a garland studio production with a difference. From Chicago to Cicero, a shadow world in Illinois is uncovered via phone conversations and flashbacks as this elegant, erudite thriller gently unravels its secrets. The climax offers what Wes Craven used to call "a delicious scare", crowd-pleasing suspense leading to a big juicy pay-off. It's not a particularly suspenseful film because the convoluted writing in many way prohibits this but 'Sorry, Wrong Number' becomes an effective thriller whenever it takes to the streets.
