Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

Anatole Litvak: Sorry, Wrong Number (US 1948) with Barbara Stanwyck (Leona Cotterell Stevenson) and Burt Lancaster (Henry Stevenson).

Il terrore corre sul filo / Valitan, väärä numero! / Anteeksi, väärä numero (Yle TV2 title 2007) / Ursäkta, fel nummer! / Racchrochez, c'est une erreur !

    US 1948. Prod.: Hal B. Wallis, Anatole Litvak per Hal Wallis Productions, Inc. 

    Director: Anatole Litvak. Sog.: dal radiodramma omonimo (1943) di Lucille Fletcher. Scen.: Lucille Fletcher. F.: Sol Polito. M.: Warren Low. Scgf.: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick. Cos.: Edith Head. Mus.: Franz Waxman. Int.: Barbara Stanwyck (Leona Cotterell Stevenson), Burt Lancaster (Henry Stevenson), Ann Richards (Sally Hunt Lord), Wendell Corey (dr. Alexander), Harold Vermilyea (Waldo Evans), Ed Begley (James Cotterell), Leif Erickson (Fred Lord), William Conrad (Morano). 89 min

    Lucille Fletcher's radioplay was broadcast in 1949 Finland by Yle the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, directed by Markus Rautio, with Emmi Jurkka as Leona. It became a classic of Finnish radio and was considered better suited to the radio than to the screen. The performance was also a high point on Emmi Jurkka's career. Jaakko Pakkasvirta directed a teleplay in 1968, starring Marja Korhonen, in the series Jännitysnäytelmä, S1.E5.

    Helsinki premiere: 30 Sep 1949 Bio-Bio, distributed by Paramount Pictures Finland.

    35 mm print from: Academy Film Archive

    Concession by Park Circus

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2024: Journeys Into Night: The World of Anatole Litvak

    Viewed at Jolly Cinema with e-subtitles in Italian, 29 June 2024

Ehsan Khoshbakht (Bologna Catalogue 2024): " An example of Anatole Litvak at the peak of his mastery, this angst-ridden and macabre film noir is about a psychosomatic invalid Leona (Barbara Stanwyck in a defining role) who one evening discovers by accident she is about to be murdered that very night. Her only weapon is a white telephone next to her bed. Lucille Fletcher wrote the script based on her hit radio play (“The greatest single radio script ever written,” according to Orson Welles). The film adaptation was far more complex as it comprised ten flashbacks, two of them containing another embedded flashback, twelve in total. The flashbacks relay information about Leona’s troublingly oedipal relationship with her father (built chillingly into the mise-en-scène) and her possessiveness over her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), lured into her life by the promise of wealth and position. Because these flashbacks are not in chronological order, they function more like the dispersed thoughts of a paralysed and hysterical woman. "

" Litvak loaded the film with splendid details (a policeman too busy attending to a small black girl to take Leona’s call seriously) and an inexplicably dreamy quality. He takes perverse pleasure in giving us terrifying power: we see the things that the bed-ridden Leona can’t see. We are a step ahead of her and that make us accomplices in a sinister game. When a nervous Burt Lancaster spots a man he thinks is spying on him in a restaurant, the white-haired man in dark glasses with a bow tie is actually Anatole Litvak in a rare cameo, taking part in the game. In line with Litvak’s ongoing fascination with vulnerable women on the edge of nervous breakdown (applied in turn to Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Deborah Kerr, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren and Samantha Eggar), it’s a terrifying film, both in its subject-matter and in Litvak’s cold, precise treatment of it. His mirror shots distort forebodingly. His signature dolly shots that once were filled with dancing people and the smoking chimneys of lively cities now creep through dark, empty hallways and staircases that resemble a gas chamber. He witnessed hell during the war and now hell had entered the home. " Ehsan Khoshbakht (Bologna Catalogue 2024)

AA: Back in Hollywood from the Why We Fight? commitment, Anatole Litvak found film noir. In The Long Night, the tragedy of Le Jour se lève turned into a melodrama with a happy end, but Sorry, Wrong Number is 100% undiluted film noir.

It is one of the films in which Female Gothic (Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Gaslight) turned darker.

The screenwriter Lucille Fletcher expanded her compact radioplay until it had a structure of flashbacks so complex that at least for me there is a loss of momentum. Yet the complexity is meaningful in its own right. The characters find themselves in a nightmare labyrinth. It drives Leona mad and Henry to murder.

Barbara Stanwyck was a great leading lady of film noir. For both Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number, she was nominated for an Academy Award. She had range. She could play iron ladies and victims of illness; here she does both. She starts as an iron lady who hijacks Henry from his true love Sally, also defying her father's will. He does not want a son-in-law from the wrong side of the tracks. 

She becomes a victim of an inexplicable illness. Is it maladie imaginaire, is it psychosomatic? She has what was then called hysteria, a diagnosis that raises more questions than it answers. In Leona's psychosexual dynamics there is an affinity with The Furies in which the father-daughter complex was developed to a new level.

The resentment of the snubbed husband and son-in-law Henry (Burt Lancaster) is a background for the crime. He is out of his depth in the world of Big Pharma and frustrated by being assigned a sinecure. The background is similar in the other famous telephone thriller of the time, Dial M for Murder. Stealing from his employer, Henry pitifully opens a criminal sidebar in which he can be in charge. But the more complicated the scheme, the more likely it is to fall apart.

Burt Lancaster was a star born in film noir. The Killers and Brute Force were his first roles. Lancaster's talent is in projecting both tremendous force and a debilitating passivity. He is perfectly cast in Sorry, Wrong Number, but for some reason he is not at his best.

In the core of Sorry, Wrong Number is a sense of fundamental distrust (your husband lies about everything and plans to murder you). It would be about paranoia (delusion of persecution) except there is no delusion. It is about an existential crisis. There is no way out.

The dynamic charge in the storytelling fails at times, and there are overdone moments. Storywise, Sorry, Wrong Number is not one of the most compelling films noir. Visually it is. The cinematographer is Sol Polito in his penultimate film. He had also shot The Long Night for Litvak. Their collaboration had started at Warner Bros. in Confessions of a Nazi Spy and City for Conquest. Litvak works miracles with the mise-en-scène and creates haunting images, of which for me the most impressive ones are those on Staten Island. Somehow their surrealism evokes to me the terrain vague in Georges Franju's Le Sang des bêtes (FR 1949).

Telephone: the lifeline, the deathline. "Pronto, pronto". In the same year, Roberto Rossellini directed Anna Magnani in the telephone monologue Una voce umana based on the one act play by Jean Cocteau. Later, it inspired Pedro Almodóvar in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Today, it's a telephone world. "My whole life was in there", states Alan (Christoph Waltz), when Nancy (Kate Winslet) drops his phone into the tulip vase in Carnage.

In his introduction to The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Ehsan Khoshbakht praised Anatole Litvak's endings. Sorry, Wrong Number has one of the most stunning endings of all fiction. "Sorry, wrong number".

A good 35 mm print from Academy Film Archive with fleeting issues of definition.