Snippets: another fine 1940s noir

A few weeks ago I had a very good time watching the 1948 noir Sorry, Wrong Number (adapted from a successful radio play by Lucille Fletcher) in my Teesri Manzil screening room. I had a dim memory of the film from decades ago, and had mis-remembered that it was a static work, largely set in a single room, with Barbara Stanwyck confined to bed, trying to save herself from murder – but there was a lot more going on in terms of camera movement and location filming. With one phone conversation after another opening up new revelations and relationships, flashbacks within flashbacks, and so on. (My friend Satish Padmanabhan and I had a little chuckle over what contemporary viewers might think about the many scenes that could only have been built around clunky old rotary phones, the phone-operator system, the possibility of crossed connections etc.)
 
I get the argument made by some people that the film over-expanded (or over-padded) the plot of the 25-minute-long radio play to make a feature film, and that consequently the suspense wasn’t as tight – but I was gripped almost all the way through. One of those terrifically nasty noirs where you can’t root for anyone in the end (even though you think you should be able to). It helped that I have been a big Stanwyck fan forever – she is super, as always. Burt Lancaster, only two years into his film career, is appropriately callow given his role, but already has the physical presence that would serve him so well in years ahead.
 
(In the interplay between their characters – ambitious small-town boy getting a ticket to a “better” life after meeting the heiress to the pharmacy empire – one sees a recurring trope from the noir/suspense melodrama of that period in American literature and film. Ira Levin’s superb debut novel A Kiss Before Dying, which I wrote about here, came out a few years later, the story centring on an amoral young man pursuing a rich copper magnate’s daughters one by one. But there are many other books and films around the upward-mobility/ticket-out theme.)

P.S. the famous 1943 radio episode of Sorry Wrong Number, with Agnes Moorehead in the lead, can be heard here. I haven't listened to it yet, but Satish did and liked it very much. (It may be time for me to get into this sort of thing + podcasts.)