Sorry, Wrong Number

When Lucille Fletcher took on the challenge of expanding her classic 30- minute radio suspenser Sorry, Wrong Number into an 89-minute feature fi lm, she opted on the Citizen Kane approach, filling the plotline to the brim with revelatory flashbacks. Barbara Stanwyck stars as bedridden hy pochondriac Leona Stevenson, who while trying to make a call from her be droom telephone gets her wires crossed and inadvertently overhears two men plotting a murder. Anxiously, Leona wades through telephone-company bureaucracy to trace the ca ll, never catching on — until it's too late — that the murder being planned is hers. A series of flashbacks details the disintegrati ng marriage between the wealthy Leona and her weakling husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), and Henry's subsequent disastrous get-ri ch-qu ick schemes involving chemist Waldo Evans (Harold Vermilyea) and a surly gangster (William Conrad). It would have been a near-sacril ege t o alter the radio play's ironic ending, which fortunately remains intact on film. Sorry Wrong Number was first heard on radio's Suspense series in 1943, with Agnes Moorehead as the harried Mrs. Stevenson (a role she 'd repeat several times on radio and on stag e). Though disappointed tha t she wasn't chosen to star in the film version, Moorehead took some sat isfaction in the fact that a reco rding of the original radio program wa s played constantly on the set to help keep Barbara Stanwyck "in the moo d".