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Because you don't call back, no, you never call back
My day took an unwanted turn for the doctor's office, but at the end of it was a very good cat.
Through no fault of Barbara Stanwyck's, I bounced so hard off Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) that I didn't even make it through the first act. It wasn't even the narrative elaborations so much as the physical opening out of the radio play which depends so strongly on the claustrophobia of being right there on the line with a woman whose only connections to the outside world are the other end of a phone conversation that even knowing it had been expanded for the screen by Lucille Fletcher herself, my emotional immersion popped like a soap bubble at the first cut away from the ticking clock of Stanwyck alone with her phone and the crossed wires of murder and didn't survive the second. I tapped out in the middle of a ghostly, sun-fogged sequence set at low tide on Staten Island that could have otherwise been spliced in from Maya Deren. I know it would have been hopelessly uncommercial in 1948 to produce a film with one actor and everyone else's voices, but I would have trusted Stanwyck to carry it off like Agnes Moorehead before her. I've even seen it done—the Post-Meridian Radio Players staged the original radio play in 2012 and kept everyone but Mrs. Stevenson out of sight. The film looked great in its deep-focus shadows, but it looked its best in the intimate confines of an opulent bedroom, the lights of the train periodically rattling over the bridge visible through the night-opened window. It didn't need any more sets. It didn't need any more faces. It seems to be regarded as a classic, so I am sure I should try it again sometime, but I could also just listen to the 1943 West Coast premiere on Suspense.
Through no fault of Barbara Stanwyck's, I bounced so hard off Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) that I didn't even make it through the first act. It wasn't even the narrative elaborations so much as the physical opening out of the radio play which depends so strongly on the claustrophobia of being right there on the line with a woman whose only connections to the outside world are the other end of a phone conversation that even knowing it had been expanded for the screen by Lucille Fletcher herself, my emotional immersion popped like a soap bubble at the first cut away from the ticking clock of Stanwyck alone with her phone and the crossed wires of murder and didn't survive the second. I tapped out in the middle of a ghostly, sun-fogged sequence set at low tide on Staten Island that could have otherwise been spliced in from Maya Deren. I know it would have been hopelessly uncommercial in 1948 to produce a film with one actor and everyone else's voices, but I would have trusted Stanwyck to carry it off like Agnes Moorehead before her. I've even seen it done—the Post-Meridian Radio Players staged the original radio play in 2012 and kept everyone but Mrs. Stevenson out of sight. The film looked great in its deep-focus shadows, but it looked its best in the intimate confines of an opulent bedroom, the lights of the train periodically rattling over the bridge visible through the night-opened window. It didn't need any more sets. It didn't need any more faces. It seems to be regarded as a classic, so I am sure I should try it again sometime, but I could also just listen to the 1943 West Coast premiere on Suspense.
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Thank you. Things may be about to get slightly complicated, which annoys me, but the cat is most excellent.
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Amen!
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I have never heard the radio play of Sorry, Wrong Number, so I did not bounce off the movie (though I can't say I loved it either), but I can see how that would happen.
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Thank you. It's just turned into that sort of week.
I have never heard the radio play of Sorry, Wrong Number, so I did not bounce off the movie (though I can't say I loved it either), but I can see how that would happen.
I've been thinking about my reaction because it's not like I don't watch movies all the time that are flagrantly unfaithful to their source material, but in this case I think what happened is that the source material is so optimized for the medium of radio—it's all voices in your ear, voices in the dark—that just changing the medium to film completely alters the effect, not just the atmosphere but how the audience even processes the narrative. Which is a neat demonstration of some of the differences between the two art forms, but I am still bummed about it.
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What happens—it makes the film feel over-narrated, because it isn't missing the same kind of frames as sequential comic panels?
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The opening credits montage, where the director summarized a lot of the world-building as a music video, was arguably more faithful than the rest of the movie, in that it was *using the medium in interesting ways*.
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