Review of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) by Dalia D — 26 Sep 2007

Sorry Wrong Number, set to a sometimes thrilling, sometimes grating Franz Waxman score (oh, the scraping violin crescendo of impending doom!), opens with a display of Barbara Stanwyck, a neurotic, JAP-type daddy's girl, sitting up in bed in her Sutton Place apartment. With a white princess phone on one nightstand and a veritable drugstore of pills on the other, we quickly see that this is her command center; a quick pan to a Victorian-looking wheelchair in the corner of the room confirms it: she's an invalid. The bedroom's casement window is open out to a beautiful nighttime view of the river and the Queensborough bridge, and she's all alone; her husband was supposed to be home hours ago and her nurse has taken the night off. She calls the operator to connect her to her husband's office, but through what seems to be crossed wires, she overhears two thugs planning a murder for that very night. Little does she imagine that the murder they are planning is her own.

The movie progresses with mounting tension as we find out more about her past, her father's wealth (he's a self-made drugstore mogul), her husband's destitution (he was a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks when she fell in love with him for no apparent reason, other than the fact that her college roommate was in love with him as well), the state of their relationship (she has the money and she wears the pants; she keeps him on a short leash and he's been struggling against it since the wedding), and his illegal activities (he's made a partnership with one of the chemists at Daddy's company and the two of them are skimming a percentage of drugs and selling them to some unsavory business colleagues, who turn out to be the big trouble makers). We don't like little missâ??her illness is psychosomatic, she wears lipstick in bed, and she's basically the most spoiled brat you've ever encounteredâ??but as the plot unfolds and we see that her husband had a hand in planning her death (he had the squeeze put on him by the unsavories), we feel a good dose of shock and (delicious) horror when we see the killer's shadow approach her bed. As she crumples dead against the pillow, the phone rings, and the killer, with the best Brooklyn Noir Gangster voice ever, picks it up and says, "Sorryâ??Wrong numba.".