SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

drystyx This bit of alleged suspense has zero suspense. It is so predictable that it isn't funny.1948 was a bit early for this kind of tripe, but even then the neo Nazi propaganda machine of Hollywood was diligent in making sure the darker haired woman in any movie would get killed off. It got even more blatant later, particularly in the seventies when most viewers were so drug crazed, and today most of those who rate here are among those brain washed Nazi die hard dorks.We know everything that will happen long before it happens, so it's just an ordeal for masochists and sadists to enjoy, and as we know, those human demons love to push their hatred down everyone else's throats, and they guffaw about it like the red necks they are.Just another sick movie for sick devil worshipers.

Mike Bozart Boy was I surprised by this one. I'm a big film-noir junkie, but for some reason I never saw this movie on any top 20 - or even top 50 - list for this genre. (Maybe I was looking at the wrong lists. ha-ha)I rented it on a whim, mainly to see a movie with a much-younger- than-Big-Valley-era Barbara Stanwyck. (I'm not quite a baby boomer.) Well, as others have pointed out on here, she is excellent in her frightened, hopelessly neurotic, bedridden role.The story is intricately told in real time with the aid of gripping flashbacks. After a plodding start, buckle up and stay very alert, as a ton of expository material gets dumped out in the middle third of the movie.The movie's ending is not quite what I thought (which I supremely liked; I don't care for endings that you can see coming in the first five minutes).So, make some popcorn. Then get the room quiet. (No talking.) Keep your mind focused on the screen. It's a suspenseful and cleverly deceptive ride. Enjoy!

Dalbert Pringle This somewhat "better-than-average", 1948, Hollywood Thriller was originally a 30-minute radio play written in 1943 by Lucille Fletcher.So, with that in mind, you can just imagine how much extra padding this film's story required in order to turn it into a 90-minute vehicle for the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster.Featuring some excellent b&w camera-work, "Sorry, Wrong Number" certainly contains enough suspense and tension-filled moments to allow the viewer to forgive its decidedly convoluted storyline that (once again) gets itself bogged down with way too much "flashback" nonsense.Well, if nothing else - Being a vintage, Hollywood production, "Sorry, Wrong Number" does, at least, rise above your typical "screwball" comedy which seemed to prevail during that particular era in movie-making history.

tieman64 This is a brief review of "Decision Before Dawn", "Sorry, Wrong Number" and "The Long Night", three films by director Anatole Litvak.Born in the Ukraine, Litvak's career as a film-maker took him from Russia to Germany to France and eventually to Hollywood, where he became a contract director for Warner Bros. He directed "Decision Before Dawn, regarded as one of his finest pictures, in 1951. It tells the tale of Happy (Oskar Werner), a German soldier who, in 1944, defects and becomes an Ally double agent. At the command of American Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill), Happy embarks on a mission deep behind German lines."Decision Before Dawn" was one of many Hollywood films released in the 1950s which attempted to rehabilitate Germans as "now our allies". Like the similarly themed "The Big Lift" (1950), it boasts superb location photography, Litvak filming in actual cities still scarred by war and still littered will real WW2 machinery. Whilst the film's promises of complexity are eventually betrayed, Litvak's establishing shots, handling of spaces and architecture, his grand outdoor vistas and a beautifully dour performance by Oskar Werner, elevate things tremendously. Werner would milk similar material in Martin Ritt's 1963 masterpiece, "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Today, "Decision Before Dawn" plays like a rebuke to Litvak's own "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" (1939), one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films.Released in 1947, and a remake of Marcel Carne's superior "Le Jour Se Leve", Litvak's "The Long Night" stars Henry Fonda as Joe Adams, a man who blockades himself in an apartment following the murder of Maximillian the Great (Vincent Price), a nightclub magician. Via flashbacks we delve into the circumstances which led to this crime.Typical of Litvak, "The Long Night" boasts audacious camera work. Litvak's whip-pans, cranes, clever forced perspectives and snaking cameras were novel for the era, and his locations drip with atmosphere. While beautiful in a clinical way, Litvak's visuals still can't match Carne's poetic realism and the gauzy romantic humanism which made "Le Jour Se Leve" so famous. Litvak's film – noirish and brooding – also ends on a note of optimism, a reversal of the Carne's more downbeat ending. The film was a financial flop.Litvak released "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) a year later. A precursor to high-concept, modern thrillers, "Number" stars Barbara Stanwyck as Leona, a crippled woman who overhears a murder plot on her telephone. From her bedroom – the film's base of operations – Litvak's camera embarks on a dizzying quest to avert the crime, dipping into the past, different locations, through telephone lines and back out again."Sorry, Wrong Number" was based on a Lucille Fletcher radio play, which Litvak's aesthetic attempts to break free from. He glides from New York suites to State Island beaches to Manhattan skylines, but the film's print-oriented origins are hard to escape. Interestingly, Stanwyck's character is revealed to suffer from psychosomatic issues, and it is her very own flights-of-fancy, her constricting nature (epitomised by her crippled legs) which results in the film's central crime. Leona smothers her lover (Burt Lancaster), wants to make him as immobile as she is, a fact which pushes him into criminality. Throughout the film, Leona's stationariness is thus contrasted with the film's countless telephones and telephone wires, devices which seem to enable and amplify Leona's neuroses. Rather than connecting her to the outside world, these wires alienate Leona further, wrapping her up in paranoia and further illusions of control. Litvak followed "Number" up with "The Snake Pit", "Wrong Number's" thematic mirror image.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Young Man With a Horn" (1950).