Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

An invalid woman alone in her apartment accidentally overhears a telephone conversation about a murder plot.

Everybody stinks except some minor characters; they call that film noir. In good old ancient Greece days, people of high extraction made mistakes in plays and suffered a magnificent death. In late-40s films noirs, their extraction is not as high, and their death is not as magnificent. The plot is full of coincidences. IMDB user miriamwebster shrewdly observed:

[quote]
Basic plot rips long arm of coincidence out of its socket--screechy self-centered invalid is accidentally patched into phone call where she overhears two men plotting a murder--her own! (What are the odds?)
[unquote]

One might ask the same question regarding the fact that the district attorney is married to, of all people, the heroine's school friend and love rival. Another observant IMDB user (lucyrfisher) deserves to be quoted in extenso:

[quote]
I love movies of this era for the social comment. I like the glimpses we get of the characters' lives. Dr Alexander with his younger girlfriend in a sleazy nightclub, for instance. (I doubt that "cardiac neurotic" is still in the DSM as a diagnosis.) Sally Hunt lives in one of those New York apartments with a strange layout - you come straight into the kitchen, and all the other rooms seem to open off it. The little boy sleeps in a closet screened off only by a curtain. And if Barbara Stanwyck is so rich, surely she could afford to live somewhere quieter? Is Staten Island really semi-deserted? Who would build a clapboard Victorian house on a beach and name it "20 Dunstan Terrace"? Where are numbers 1-19? Why does Sally Hunt have a peculiar English accent? And why does Waldo Evans waffle about growing up in Surrey among horses, and his longing to buy a little place in "Dorking, England"?
[unquote]

Anyway, this is the end of this rather tired review (mine, I mean, not the ones I quoted). And now you get my rating.

Rating: 51