‘Sorry, Wrong Number‘, made in 1948, was originally written by Lucille Fletcher as a radio play script, and successfully broadcast on this medium, which was very popular at the time. Orson Welles, also a master of the genre, considered it the best radio script of all time. The film adaptation directed by Anatole Litvak managed to perfectly translate the sound into the visual, thus creating one of the classic films of the ‘film noir’ genre. It is also one of the best films made in the United States by Anatole Litvak, a Ukrainian-born director, educated in Moscow, whom the waves of destiny have pushed him to live and work in Germany, France, the United States, and in recent decades. back in Europe.
The story in ”Sorry, Wrong Number‘ has a very ‘modern’ structure. A few years before Hitchcock, Anatole Litvak constrains his heroine to a single room, the bedroom where Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) lives. Leona is a wealthy New Yorker, the bedroom is on the third floor of a sumptuous mansion, the windows face the Brooklyn Bridge, but the disease restricts her movements and in addition, the maid and caregiver are free that day, her husband (Burt Lancaster) does not return home in the evening, and the woman is alone. Her means of communication with the world is the telephone, with its manual exchanges with operators, presented in the short introductory text in the terms in which we speak today about the Internet. An accidental connection causes Leona to overhear a conversation about a possible murder in planning in New York in the next few hours. She tries to alert the police, but this has other more important matters to deal with, and in addition, she does not have much information about who was discussing or the possible location of the future crime. Continuing to investigate over the phone and worried about her husband’s absence, the single woman begins to realize that that the accidentally intercepted conversation may be related to her person and that of her husband, an ambitious young man of lower origin, never well accommodated in her family of pharmaceutical industry (yes, indeed!) tycoons. Is it possible that the potential victim of the planned crime is herself?
The combination of the single woman feelings in the one room with the flashbacks and imagined scenes based on phone calls works very well. Barbara Stanwyck proves in this film what an exceptional actress she was. At first I thought that she seemed a bit ‘stiff’ in the scenes in which the story of the rich heiress who gets almost everything she wants (and her father’s money can buy) but not love and marital happiness is told. In the tense scenes, as the threat increases and the make-up disappears, the actress enters the role perfectly and conveys to the audience the feeling of terror that the lonely and vulnerable woman feels. Burt Lancaster‘s role is less generous, so we can appreciate more what a handsome guy he was at the time. The music is insistent at times, with languid violins in the style of the time, which makes us appreciate even more its lack when the soundtrack is letting hear only the action in the scenes from the end of the film. The courage to choose a very unconventional ending, of course, increases the value of the film and places it among the classic successes of the genre. ‘Sorry, Wrong Number‘ confirms, 74 years after its release, the praises it earned over time.