Off the Hook: A bedridden heiress glimpses the face of doom in ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’

Barbara Stanwyck, ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ (1948). Crossed phone lines deliver chilling news to a woman stranded in her apartment.

Post war prosperity,

women’s position

in society goes

under the microscope

Contains some spoilers

By Paul Parcellin

‘Sorry, Wrong Number’ (1946)

In “Sorry, Wrong Number,” Barbara Stanwyck plays Leona Stevenson, a woman distinctly different from cold blooded Phylis Dietrichson, whom Stanwyck portrayed in “Double Indemnity” a couple of years before. But Leona is no femme fatale — she’s a femme in jeopardy. 

That alone ought to make us feel sympathy for her, but she’s hard to warm up to.

At first glance Leona is churlish, short tempered and demanding. But she’s also a bedridden invalid, apparently neglected by her businessman husband and left alone in a sprawling New York apartment. Her bedside phone is her lone companion.

Things get cooking one night when telephone lines get crossed and she overhears a couple of mugs plotting a murder. It gradually dawns on her that someone's planning to make her the guest of honor at a deadly soiree.

Ann Richards as Sally Hunt. The film's flashbacks are channeled through phone calls.

She tries to tell the police, who take her for a crank. As the night wears on her worries turn to panic, and finally, terror — Stanwyck’s transition from panic to terror is something to see.

Prosperity and the woman's place in society

That’s not to say that “Sorry, Wrong Number” is merely a nail-biter or a horror film. Beneath its thriller surface the film turns a gimlet eye on post war prosperity and women’s position in the society. 

It’s the latter half of the 1940s and there’s a paucity of marital bliss among the folks we meet. By all appearances, affairs and marriages of convenience are rife in post-war America, where power, position and money are within reach, and joy is all but a distant memory.

Burt Lancaster and Stanwyck. Husbands order their downtrodden wives around like domestic servants, but that's not the case with Leona.

Here, most everyone is a bully or a victim. Husbands order their downtrodden wives around like domestic servants, while the breadwinner’s job is of paramount importance. Household management and child rearing are undervalued maintenance work that the little lady performs without complaint, or else. 

Henry is the poor son-in-law who’s been shunted off to the back office, pushing papers in dad-in-law’s mega firm, and he’s pissed.

Leona is the exception. When she strong-arms her husband, Henry (Burt Lancaster), into submission, we see how deeply dissatisfied he is with their materially comfortable, yet emotionally vacant, life. Leona, the “cough drop queen,” is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, James Cotterell (Ed Begley), who heads a medical supply and pharmaceutical corporation. 

Henry is the poor son-in-law who’s been shunted off into the back office, pushing papers in dad-in-law’s mega firm, and he’s pissed. But it’s precisely because of his vacuity and lack of ambition that he landed where he is.

Lancaster as Henry, a willing prisoner of his father-in-law's fortune.

His type is frequently seen in noir — the unexceptional man who believes he deserves something better. But now, Henry, the seemingly dormant volcano of frustration, is ready to blow his top. Before long he makes foolish choices that put himself and others in harm’s way. 

As he’s making his furtive moves we can almost empathize with him, even if we can’t abide by his actions. His hands are tied, or so he believes, and there’s little chance of getting out of his predicament without taking drastic measures.

Flashbacks conveyed in phone conversations

Meanwhile, Leona is prisoner in her bedroom. Only in flashbacks do we see her freed from the constrictions that have left her all but immobilized. The flashbacks, seen from various characters’ points of view and conveyed in phone conversations, reveal her backstory. 

Her mother died giving birth to her, and she was raised  by a well meaning but distant father. You might think that her frustration and pain as a bedridden adult are the source of her sour and demanding personality, but in flashback we see that she’s difficult even at her best.

Stanwyck, Lancaster, Richards. Leona steals her friend's beau at a dance.

She snubs a college friend, Sally Hunt (Ann Richards), whom Henry is courting, and brazenly steals him from her. Later, once they become an item, she browbeats her father into accepting Henry into the fold. 

The old man doesn’t believe Henry’s good son-in-law material, and it turns out he’s right. Henry isn’t really attracted to Leona, but an heiress is an heiress, and he adapts. Meanwhile, her dad is carousing with a lady young enough to be his daughter — no one’s perfect, you see. 

“Sorry, Wrong Number” favors dialog over movement, yet director Anatole Litvak maintains Hitchcock-like suspense and conjures up a persistent sense of dread about Leona’s fate.

Dramatic parts of the story take place in Leona’s opulent room, but flashbacks give us some breathing space, taking the action (not that there’s a lot of it) out of the confined bedroom and placing it in the outside world. 

Because it was adapted from a radio drama, “Sorry, Wrong Number” favors dialog over movement, yet director Anatole Litvak maintains Hitchcock-like suspense and conjures up a persistent sense of dread about Leona’s fate. Although she’s difficult and a bottomless pit of need, we stay sympathetic with her as the threat against her grows. 

But a devastating revelation alters our view of the stricken heiress, from pitiful to pathetic with a wisp of malevolence thrown in for good measure. (I’ll avoid spoilers here). 

Harold Vermilyea, Lancaster. Henry's impulses lead him down a less righteous path.

The stunner brings a sea change to Henry’s outlook on his relationship with his wife. The dam breaks, and the years of frustration and rage he’s been holding back begin to rush to the surface. 

He makes unsavory, foolish choices, as noir antiheroes do, morphing from beleaguered trophy husband to unwitting villain, and realizing that his underhanded actions have gotten him in over his head. 

With friends like these ...

His new friends are gangsters and when they try to squeeze money out of him he caves in to their pressure. But what happens next is yet an added layer of irony that he couldn’t  see coming, and it makes the story all the more tragic.

 Leona is scheduled to receive an uninvited visitor at 11:15 p.m. and like the Grim Reaper himself he will work efficiently and leave little trace of his clandestine operations. As the clock runs down, Leona can only hope for a visit from a hero who will save her from her fate. But in her world, heroes seem to be in short supply.