Sorry, Wrong Number
Because Stanwyck never worked at one studio for long, she never had studio backing in the annual Oscar race, and so she went home empty-handed four times, the last time for a movie version Sorry, Wrong Number, an expanded adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s well-known radio play. Stanwyck made no bones about her disappointment at not winning an Oscar. When she lost in 1937 for Stella Dallas, she was quoted as saying, “I put my life’s blood into that one. I should have won.” Certainly she should have won over that year’s winner, Luise Rainer, for her mostly silent, victimized Chinese wife in The Good Earth. But Greta Garbo never won an Oscar either, and I’d probably give it to her for her career-best work in Camille that same year. Stanwyck’s 1941 nomination for Ball of Fire was a surprise and must be counted as a nod for her work in The Lady Eve, too. She lost to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion, an uncertain performance that was rewarded to make up for passing over Fontaine’s far superior work in Rebecca the previous year. At least Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson lost to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), a performance that was at the very least competitive and given by an actress who was in the same league, talent-wise, as Stanwyck.
Stanwyck’s work in Sorry, Wrong Number strikes me as an attempt to do something the Oscar voters might like, for the showy role of bedridden neurotic Leona Stevenson calls for something more along the lines of the scenery-chewing style of a Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford than it does Stanwyck’s best life-or-death realness. She lost to Jane Wyman’s sweet, victimized deaf mute in Johnny Belinda (1948), the polar opposite of Stanwyck’s strident Leona, who mostly victimizes herself. If I had my druthers, I’d give Stanwyck an Oscar for Ladies of Leisure in 1930 (Norma Shearer could definitely do without her award for The Divorcee), and another for The Lady Eve in 1941. As for her high-pressure work in Wrong Number, I’m glad she didn’t win for this atypical, sloppy picture; it’s not at all representative of her talent, her artistry, or her overall style.
Agnes Moorehead began her career in radio with Orson Welles, and she started her film career with him in Citizen Kane (1941), playing the mother of the future tycoon. She also appeared in Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as the hysterical Aunt Fanny, one of the greatest performances in film history. Moorehead is huge and histrionic in Ambersons, but she makes us painfully aware that Aunt Fanny herself knows about her own self-indulgent shortcomings and can’t do a thing about them. That awareness, too, is key to her performance in the radio version of Sorry, Wrong Number, first broadcast on a show called Suspense on May 25, 1943, and then reprised on the radio, by popular demand, seven times before 1960.
Fletcher’s play runs a little over twenty minutes, and it makes spooky use of telephone sounds; every dial tone and rotary click ups the chiller ante. Moorehead’s original performance in 1943 is her most human and relatable; she emphasized the shrewish nature of Leona as she continued to perform the role over the next twenty years, but she usually began on a quietly whiny note, as if Leona talks just to hear herself speak. Her voice sounds thin, like a querulous spinster’s, and she scolds her interlocutors like a prim spinster would after accidentally overhearing a murder plan over a crossed telephone wire.
Leona is given to telling everyone that her health has been poor for twelve years (so that we quickly suspect she’s suffering more from a psychosomatic or psychological ailment), and she is easily flustered, a weakness that will be her ultimate downfall. Her thin voice rises up to high, fluting tones when Leona gets imperious; Moorehead excitingly adds some quivers to her middle register as Leona starts to get scared (the best, or at least the most virtuosic, performance she gave of this play was the one she did in 1945). When she calls the police, they reason with her, but she hangs up on them, and then says, “Why did I hang up the phone like that? Now he’ll think I am a fool.”
Moorehead’s Leona is capable of briefly seeing herself for what she is, a professional nuisance, but she’s unable to change—not in the twenty or so minutes she has left before she’s murdered by the same man she overheard on the crossed wire. She’s sick, all right, but sick in her mind, and we can’t blame her husband too much for wanting to murder her; she is obnoxious, and exhausting. The achievement of Fletcher’s play, which was written purely as an exercise in radio suspense, and Moore-head’s tour-de-force performance, is that we don’t want Leona to be killed, no matter how annoying she is. We recoil from her, then identify with her rising panic—quite a feat to pull off in such a limited amount of time.
Moorehead is more than a little hammy, but this part doesn’t call for restraint; the role of Leona requires an actress to go as all-out as Moore-head does, with her symphony of gasps and rasps and arpeggios of hysteria up and down the vocal scale. It’s a tribute to her work that it’s hard to imagine seeing this Leona; she exists as a voice, and Fletcher taps into the fear associated with this disembodiment. On the telephone, we’re all verbal consciousness and no body, just as radio voices are Beckett-like instruments talking to themselves, just as Leona does.
It’s just you and her in the dark, as Leona finally descends to desperate whispering, sure that a man is in the house and about to come up and stab her to death. The people on the other end of her line get less and less helpful, until she’s finally disposed of, her almost sexual scream blending into the shriek of a train whistle.
Moorehead’s career was rather unfulfilling after her Welles films, but how do you follow those two seminal movies? She’s probably most known now as Endora on the 1960s TV show Bewitched, but she’s really the archetypal radio actress, a performer who could do pretty much anything with her voice, best restricted to extremes of short duration.
Leona Stevenson, then, is a part for an actress who can get full mileage out of playing a neurotic. This type of role goes against Stanwyck’s grain, her aspect and image of total, widespread knowledge. For her screenplay, Fletcher opens up her radio script with flashbacks, and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks, and this strategy weakens her original conception to the point of almost total incoherence.
Under the credits for Sorry, Wrong Number, we see a phone and its shadow, and Franz Waxman’s stormy music gives way, momentarily, to an ominous telephone busy signal. So far, so good, but when a title card comes up under the image of girls working a switchboard, it’s easy to predict trouble ahead. “In the tangled networks of a great city,” reads the card, “the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives … It is the servant of our common needs—the confidante of our inmost secrets … life and happiness wait upon its ring … and horror … and loneliness … and … death!!!” Those three exclamation marks after “death” set the unfortunate, “Step right up!” carnival barker tone of this picture, and this crudeness remains consistent from first to last. Anatole Litvak directs Sorry, Wrong Number as if his audience is both stupid and greedy for lurid detail, and the effect is one of thoughtless confusion.
The camera takes in a nighttime interior and a phone off the hook; we then see Stanwyck’s Leona, crying, “Opera-tuh, opera-tuh!” from her bed, her diamonds glinting on her fussy lace nightgown. Stanwyck pats her hair and dabs at her face with a lace handkerchief to get across how pampered and cloistered this woman is in the heat of summer (so much of the performance that follows will be predicated on surface indications such as these). After Stanwyck hears the murder plan, she furrows her brow and actually shakes the phone in frustration—a weak choice, borne more of a performer’s desperation than a character’s frustration.
It becomes instantly clear just how wrong it is to see Leona in this first scene when we should really only be hearing her on the phone, on the radio, in the dark; Stanwyck has to make impossible physical transitions as a real woman in a real bed. What to do? She falls back on invalid clichés (panting, obsequious looks), and decisive body movements, but there’s no emotional throughline to what she’s doing. Litvak keeps moving the camera away from Stanwyck to look around the apartment so that she can just be a voice like Moorehead was, but he always has to come back to her, and nothing can hide the sketchiness of this character and this situation as visualized.
Stanwyck’s version of this woman’s high-handed foolishness is painful to watch because it’s all on one note, all done in a monochromatic style that doesn’t have the jittery fun of Davis’s emoting or Crawford’s heartfelt reaching for effects. Stanwyck can’t make herself over into that kind of showboating actress at this late date, so she just heedlessly blasts her way through, putting lipstick on while staring at her grotesquely preening face in a mirror (it’s enough to make you imagine Capra shouting, “Barbara, stop this hamming! You can have one of my Oscars!”).
Glamour shots of a 1930s Stanwyck peer out from behind furniture belonging to Leona’s father (Ed Begley), who tells his daughter that maybe what she heard was just a gag on the radio (an in-joke from Fletcher). Leona talks next to Miss Jennings, secretary to her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), and this woman is an Agnes Moorehead type, a skinny old maid played by Dorothy Neumann as if she were doing a dreary comedy sketch. Things get worse with the introduction of Sally Hunt, Henry’s old girlfriend, played by Ann Richards as a dippy blond who seems to be trapped in a Carol Burnett-style parody of phony 1940s acting.
Lancaster is ill at ease in his role—great to look at but still green as an actor. He lets Stanwyck push him around in their scenes together until we get the feeling that she doesn’t like her rich girl hypochondriac one bit. Bette Davis could seem to despise some of her characters, and yet still be exciting to watch because of all the effort it took to put them together. But Stanwyck can’t get by on this kind of technique; it feels too shallow for her. In her scenes with Begley, always a crude actor, Stanwyck does fast-sell work without grace or thought—this from an actress who even in some of her worst movies always seems to be thinking, weighing her options, considering.
“But that’s what acting is, it’s re-acting,” she told John Kobal in the 1960s. “When youngsters ask me how to act, I say, ‘Don’t. Re-act! Don’t act!’” World class advice, and yet in Sorry, Wrong Number, one of her best-known movies and the occasion for her last Oscar nomination, Stanwyck does nothing but “act” in Litvak’s half-assed vacuum, where everybody shouts for no reason and strides around. It’s as if the base of her talent had been dynamited away.
A honeymoon montage featuring wealthy Leona and poor, ambitious Henry only serves as an occasion for Stanwyck to cement the “she was too bossy and that’s why she lost Robert Taylor” publicity narrative that would cling to her for the rest of her life. The interminable flashbacks keep coming. Genteel-voiced Sally calls Leona and tells her about a trek she made to Staten Island because of some suspicions she had about Henry. “I waited there for about an hour,” she says. “Nothing happened.” No kidding! (Non-fans of Richards might be interested to know that she retired from acting shortly after this, thankfully, and devoted herself to poetry, publishing a collection in 1971 called The Grieving Senses. I kid you not.)
Sally keeps talking and talking at pay phones and crying, “Wait, I know I have another nickel!” while we pray that she doesn’t, and finally she’s all out of money to gab on the phone with. Hearing a doorbell downstairs, Stanwyck’s Leona gets up from her sickbed and cries, “I can’t come down, I’m on the top floor and I’m sick!” with her voice breaking on “sick,” in that pure emotion way of hers. This role doesn’t need that emotion, though, which is why we see so little of it.
Litvak cuts next to a floor show with a female dancer being twirled and twirled upside down by her partner (it seems like he’ll bring on some jugglers next to pad the running time a little more). Dr. Alexander (Wendell Corey) breaks the news to Henry that Leona is “what we call a cardiac-neurotic,” and when he hears this, Henry winds a phone cord around his wrist until the phone falls to the floor (broad foreshadowing of the end, of course). After hearing this diagnosis, Leona screams, “Liars!” about ten times, as she collapses on her bed.
Following this fresh blast of hysterics, Litvak unwinds an even duller flashback involving Waldo Evans (Harold Vermilyea), a tediously mousy type who went in with Henry on a scheme to embezzle money. The film goes right to sleep for a long time owing to Vermilyea’s measured, Edmund Gwenn-like voice. And Fletcher does Lancaster a real disservice; we are told in dialogue everything his character is supposed to be feeling, when it would be so much better to just show a few short scenes of him becoming discontented with his marriage and his own lapdog status. The actor rushes through this movie with scarcely veiled impatience.
Stanwyck bypasses the few occasions when she might have made this cardboard woman more complex—even moments when she could have made Leona at least a quasi-recognizable human being, such as the scene where she has her first psychosomatic attack in front of Henry after wondering if he’s only married her for her money. We get no sense of Leona’s insecurity or her relation to her father, only the same “shoot the works,” hard-edged emoting; there’s no vulnerability, no humanity, just bulldozer acting. We learn that Henry has set Leona up to be killed for her insurance, as if this whole project was penance for Double Indemnity. This time, the actress who played the murderer is on the receiving end; this movie is a steep price for Stanwyck to pay for Phyllis Dietrichson.
So, finally, we come to the main event, Leona’s final act fight for life. For twelve days, Stanwyck played her scenes in bed in order, and she took them seriously. Litvak had her do take after take, and she trusted him, even when the crew started to get angry and told her that she had done enough. I wonder if better, more nuanced takes might not have been left on the cutting room floor; nothing in Litvak’s career suggests that he was a good judge of performances. In fact, he had a knack for making a hash of promising projects (see particularly his enervating collaboration with Vivien Leigh in The Deep Blue Sea [1955]). I’m willing to make Litvak the villain here because nothing in Stanwyck’s work before or after this movie suggests the dumbed-out flattening that occurs in this picture.
Taken purely as an exercise, and detached from the preceding hour or so, the last reel of Sorry, Wrong Number contains some colorful work from its star—not serious or first-rate Stanwyck, but definitely colorful. We see Leona’s shaky fingers on her white phone, and when she finds out that she’s calling the morgue, she throws herself all the way down out of frame while Waxman’s music goes nuts. His scoring really helps, and it deserves a lot of credit for making these last moments what they are (Fletcher herself was married to the Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, so she knew the importance of a musical score). Leona thinks to call the police, then quickly calls the hospital to get a nurse. This kind of stupidity will be exhibited in many a horror film to come, where the audience yells at the screen and gets to feel superior to the dopey victim.
Her husband calls: “Did you say Mr. Steven … Mr. Stevenson from New Haven?” Leona asks, and Stanwyck’s hesitation between “Steven” and “Stevenson” displays the naturalistic talent that’s been missing in action all through this movie. Stanwyck makes Leona look like a little girl now, even with her messed-up, gray-streaked hair. “Evans said that you wanted me to … to-die,” she says, strategically using that wooden “to” of hers to get across the stuttering simplicity Leona has reached. She apologizes for being so “awful” to her husband, but we should have felt this ambivalence earlier. Now it’s too late, for us and for Leona.
Waxman’s music steadily builds as Henry tells her to get out of the house (the insurance money is unnecessary now, a too-cute twist by Fletcher). “I can’t move, Henry, I … I’m too frightened,” she cries, believably paralyzed. Then she looks up, and her face freezes. “Henry,” she says, quietly. “Henry,” she repeats. “Henry, there’s somebody coming up the stairs!” she screams, building up to that third “Henry” until her voice crescendos and breaks into terrified little pieces flying around the room (this magnificent vocal flourish, with Waxman’s music, has never failed to raise gooseflesh on my arms whenever I’ve watched this). Finally Leona is pleading with an unseen assassin, promising to give him anything, then screaming hoarsely as he goes in for the kill (I assume he strangles her). The curtain line is just a terse, “Sorry, wrong number,” and this is the one improvement on Fletcher’s original play, where the killer was wordier after the murder.
Stanwyck did this part for Lux Radio Theatre in 1950, but she didn’t do the Moorehead version, unfortunately. The Lux broadcast runs about an hour, and it does play better than the film, but it still doesn’t have the concentrated sting of the Moorehead original. After caterwauling her way through the finale, Stanwyck has to come back on and sputter about how she just loves Lux soap, I’m afraid. It isn’t acting, what she does in Sorry, Wrong Number, but it is classic awards-baiting, and it is, like that Lux plug, pure, unadulterated show business.