DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sorry, Wrong Number, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, 1948
Not all suspense films as is more and more the case these days have to depend of techno-gizmos, or weird plot shifts to throw you off the scent. Take the film under review, Sorry, Wrong Number, a black and white film from back in the 1940s. Most of the action, most serious action takes place in a well-kept bedroom, a bedroom with a single women beside a telephone, a telephone very useful to the plot line but also a hellish instrument when she overhears a seemingly unrelated to her telephone call about a murder to be carried out for unknown reasons that very night. And while flashbacks detail how things have come to this past the woman’s increasingly disturbed mental state, the woman’s bedroom which includes a panoramic view of passing trains, and its confines determine what is going on.
Maybe the operative lesson to be learned, a cautionary tale if you will, in this 1948 Anatole Litvak-directed film is that you should not marry the boss’ daughter, period (or if you are the boss’ daughter let your man find his own way in the world, period). Here Leona (played by a suitably fear-struck and frantic Barbara Stanwyck) as a very fragile and sickly young woman, although according to a confidential doctor’s report she is physically fine so the symptoms seem to be psychosomatic, whose father has doted on her all her life is attracted to rough-hewn Henry (played by Burt Lancaster). Now Henry is from nowhere, a working class guy whom Leona eyes at a dance (and “steals” away from another woman). They meet and she, used to getting her own way always, draws a bee-line for him. Being from nowhere Henry, whatever attractions she holds for him, is ambitious, has a million ideas about becoming his own man, can also see that she can through her father help him along in his ambitions to be somebody.
And that is where the boss’ daughter angle gets full play, and gets the story-line moving to its fateful end. Leona and Henry marry and settle down with her father. A big mistake. Henry desperately wants to be his own man at something and holding a job in the father’s company, a big time pharma operation and under his roof makes him edgy. Makes him want to get out on his own. Leona though, her father’s daughter to a tee, takes a fit when Henry proposes they move out on their own. That set her heart problems going full throttle until she had become so overwrought that she had become bedridden as we see from the opening scene.
Henry though has decided, come hell or high water, to make it on his own by fair means or foul. He gets involved, gets involved way over his head, with some bad hombres to whom he sells stolen chemicals from his father-in law’s plant. They pressure him into signing an I.O.U. for big dough which he had not got when he tries to cut them out of the cycle. They, not the kind to be left standing with no dough, “suggest” that his sick wife has a big insurance policy issued on her life, a policy that should be come due very soon. Hence the conversation on the telephone that she had overheard as she pieces everything together is a plan to murder her, murder her that very night. As she learns more she gets more frantic, particularly when she hears a prowler downstairs whom she can’t do anything about (or won’t if you go by the doctor’s report). In the end despite a last minute call from Henry who tells her go to the window and yell bloody murder (almost literally) to save her life the villain’s work is done. Henry who had been under investigation about the stolen chemicals is as she is being murdered apprehended by the cops. Yeah, maybe it is best to just not marry the boss’ daughter and leave it at that. Sorry, Henry, sorry but your pleas were too late and you are going to take the big step-off on this one, no question.
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