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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