SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

JohnHowardReid Complicated (multiple flashbacks within flashbacks) but highly engrossing, Sorry Wrong Number still packs a wallop - even with today's more blasé and less tolerant audiences. Litvak's driving direction with its remarkably mobile camera moodily prowling through appropriately lavish sets and strikingly noirish natural locations, superbly abets Lucille Fletcher's grippingly bizarre screenplay. Litvak isn't afraid to use close-ups either. And his players not only stand up to this relentless probing but offer some of the greatest performances of their lives. Both Stanwyck and Lancaster make formidable principals. Outstanding character study contributors include Shirley Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Harold Vermilyea and the ever-reliable Ed Begley. Note Joyce Compton as the blonde who briefly interrupts Begley's all-alone-in-the-big-house phone chat; and director Anatole Litvak as a diner in dark glasses - As an inside joke, Lancaster testily turns to waiter Vuolo and pointedly asks: "Who is that man?").

Panamint From the first slam bang of the jarring musical theme this film seems to throw itself at the viewer too forcefully. After the opening an absolute torrent of words spill out, every second crammed with dialog, literally thousands of words, spoken by characters who seemingly never take a breath. OK, I understand that movies don't need to be Budd Boetticher or John Ford westerns, moving along almost elegantly with visual storytelling and camera work telling you as much as the dialog, but "Sorry, Wrong Number" goes too far in the opposite direction: it is a radio play stretched out with thousands of added words. The camera work in this film is technically alright but not used the way that a great director turns a film into art. Ms. Stanwyck is terrific but her character is immobile, an invalid, mostly speaking or listening to spoken dialog. All of the other actors are good, including an English actor who recites extensive dialog while blacked out in profile, standing like a statue and talking into a phone. In other words, everybody just stand and spew the dialog as fast as you can then move on to the next scene.A limited amount of location movement is done including some flashbacks but there is constant dialog, narration or the jarring theme overlaying most of it. We can visually follow what is going on as characters move around at the seashore and it could have been done with the sound of seagulls or surf or boat whistles or something atmospheric, but the director doesn't seem to trust his camera to tell the story. Hitchcock in "Vertigo" confidently features much moving around in automobiles, in and out of buildings, in a church/cemetery etc (not to mention the classic crashing surf scene) with little or no talking and mostly just the low bassoon sounds of Bernard Herrmann's musical score. Similarly, much of the actual story of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is presented via his camera lens rather than spoken words. The end of the film is thrilling, as advertised, and it delivers. Overall, the radio-play styled acting is good but I expected to see more of a "film" classic, and was disappointed to find little artistic value here as film-making. Also, my ears almost hurt from the 128 minute wall-to-wall verbal assault. I think that the original radio play format would be the best format for this work. The lesson to be learned from all this is that if you are going to direct a film, trust your camera to help you convey some of the story ideas, you don't need to totally dominate the camera with added noise and talk.

tieman64 This is a brief review of "Decision Before Dawn", "Sorry, Wrong Number" and "The Long Night", three films by director Anatole Litvak.Born in the Ukraine, Litvak's career as a film-maker took him from Russia to Germany to France and eventually to Hollywood, where he became a contract director for Warner Bros. He directed "Decision Before Dawn, regarded as one of his finest pictures, in 1951. It tells the tale of Happy (Oskar Werner), a German soldier who, in 1944, defects and becomes an Ally double agent. At the command of American Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill), Happy embarks on a mission deep behind German lines."Decision Before Dawn" was one of many Hollywood films released in the 1950s which attempted to rehabilitate Germans as "now our allies". Like the similarly themed "The Big Lift" (1950), it boasts superb location photography, Litvak filming in actual cities still scarred by war and still littered will real WW2 machinery. Whilst the film's promises of complexity are eventually betrayed, Litvak's establishing shots, handling of spaces and architecture, his grand outdoor vistas and a beautifully dour performance by Oskar Werner, elevate things tremendously. Werner would milk similar material in Martin Ritt's 1963 masterpiece, "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Today, "Decision Before Dawn" plays like a rebuke to Litvak's own "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" (1939), one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films.Released in 1947, and a remake of Marcel Carne's superior "Le Jour Se Leve", Litvak's "The Long Night" stars Henry Fonda as Joe Adams, a man who blockades himself in an apartment following the murder of Maximillian the Great (Vincent Price), a nightclub magician. Via flashbacks we delve into the circumstances which led to this crime.Typical of Litvak, "The Long Night" boasts audacious camera work. Litvak's whip-pans, cranes, clever forced perspectives and snaking cameras were novel for the era, and his locations drip with atmosphere. While beautiful in a clinical way, Litvak's visuals still can't match Carne's poetic realism and the gauzy romantic humanism which made "Le Jour Se Leve" so famous. Litvak's film – noirish and brooding – also ends on a note of optimism, a reversal of the Carne's more downbeat ending. The film was a financial flop.Litvak released "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) a year later. A precursor to high-concept, modern thrillers, "Number" stars Barbara Stanwyck as Leona, a crippled woman who overhears a murder plot on her telephone. From her bedroom – the film's base of operations – Litvak's camera embarks on a dizzying quest to avert the crime, dipping into the past, different locations, through telephone lines and back out again."Sorry, Wrong Number" was based on a Lucille Fletcher radio play, which Litvak's aesthetic attempts to break free from. He glides from New York suites to State Island beaches to Manhattan skylines, but the film's print-oriented origins are hard to escape. Interestingly, Stanwyck's character is revealed to suffer from psychosomatic issues, and it is her very own flights-of-fancy, her constricting nature (epitomised by her crippled legs) which results in the film's central crime. Leona smothers her lover (Burt Lancaster), wants to make him as immobile as she is, a fact which pushes him into criminality. Throughout the film, Leona's stationariness is thus contrasted with the film's countless telephones and telephone wires, devices which seem to enable and amplify Leona's neuroses. Rather than connecting her to the outside world, these wires alienate Leona further, wrapping her up in paranoia and further illusions of control. Litvak followed "Number" up with "The Snake Pit", "Wrong Number's" thematic mirror image.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Young Man With a Horn" (1950).

AaronCapenBanner Anatole Litvak directed this suspenseful tale that stars Barbara Stanwyck as Leona Stevenson, a rich but neurotic heiress who is now bedridden, and married to Henry(played by Burt Lancaster) who loves her but resents having his ambitions stifled by her father, and is getting tired of her hypochondria. One night, Leona picks up the phone and is horrified to overhear a sinister, cross-wired conversation involving two men discussing the imminent murder of a woman. Leona frantically tries to convince both Henry and the Police of this, but is unable to, and will come to learn that the murdered woman is to be her... Based on a successful radio play, film is quite interesting, as its plot unfolds via flashback, with mounting tension leading to a truly chilling end...