Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

In films such as Notorious and Sorry, Wrong Number where women initially seem to have the power of speech, they talk too much and must be silenced. Furthermore, their words are meaningless, characterized as babble (fitting term for those trying to speak an incomprehensible language imperfectly heard from a far-off country).

Sorry, Wrong Number was adapted from a very successful radio drama.^[7] As such, it is one of the few cinematic texts that has a free-standing auditory text to which it can be compared, the appeal of radio competing, as it were, with film's cinematic pleasures. The central figure of the woman, controlling the narrative through the telephone and her voice, becomes the focal point of a tense negotiation between sound-based narrative and the power of the image, the dangers of an overweaning sound track merged with the figure of an overbearing woman.

After a brief prologue illustrating the labor of telephone operators, the film introduces us to Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman trying to call her husband at the office. The bedridden Leona accidentally overhears two men on a party line plotting to kill a woman that night. Torn between trying to alert the indifferent police and contacting her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), Leona grows more and more distraught. In addition, she receives a

series of disturbing calls from strangers, informing her of Henry's recent illegal activities. She finally realizes that because of her husband, she is the woman the men are planning to kill, and, as she finally reaches him on the phone, they do. Though confined to her bed, Leona in effect organizes the narrative through what she hears. She is the one who makes sense of the narrative, and as such becomes our surrogate, an auditing spectator within the text.

It is interesting to compare the character of Leona as a spectator-surrogate (especially a female one) with L. B. Jeffries in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). The films illustrate differing male/female relations to knowledge, marriage, work, and voyeurism, as well as differences between sound and image and their related technologies. In place of the man who actively looks/sees/knows, Sorry, Wrong Number presents a woman who accidentally overhears, against her will learns, and, because she knows, dies.

The characters are similar, as are their circumstances. Both are invalids, Jeff confined to a wheelchair, Leona to bed. Her illness is a (the) feminine condition of invalidism and smacks of nineteenth-century antecedents like Henry James's sister Alice, strong women who could not openly exercise power and who masked their extraordinary will by an extravagant show of physical weakness.^[8] Dr. Alexander, praising the miracle of twentieth-century psychiatry, insists that Leona's illness is all in her mind. ("Oh, the pain's real enough," he says to Henry, who smashes the nearest phone.) Jeff has become incapacitated in a more masculine way, through a violent collision in the course of his work. Each is a busybody and a meddler. Jeff uses his camera to shut out the woman in his life, to avoid marriage and fix the world as it is. Leona, on the other hand, is very much married and uses the telephone to obsessively track Henry down.

From the central base of a single room, both characters are isolated and free to use their instruments. His is the camera; hers is the telephone. However, while Jeff is able to make a living off of his visual drive, what Leona can get from the telephone is transitory compared to Jeff's captured (and saleable) moments. What Leona hears comes and goes like the train rattling her window at night, and when it is gone there is no proof that it ever passed. When Leona tries to tell the police she overheard a conversation, the problem remains that she can't prove it and they can't trace it. While Jeff can prove empirically that something is buried in the garden by comparing an old slide with a new image, Leona's "voices" remain unidentified throughout the course of the film. Jeff and Leona also have differing relations to voyeurism. Jeff looks for pleasure; Leona listens for information. Sorry, Wrong Number is not so much sound -based as dialogue-based. There is little audio-voyeurism or pleasure in hearing for the character, however the original radio audience would have enjoyed the double thrill of eavesdropping on a woman talking on the telephone and on the people on the other end. Although both films end with the main character being overwhelmed when the necessary voyeuristic dis-

tance is violated, Leona's listening is a sign of her dependence rather than her will to pursue her own pleasure.

In Sorry, Wrong Number, the telephone becomes the woman's instrument, calling to mind the cultural canard about women "talking too much," "all the time," or compulsively on the phone.^[9] Like the radio and other sound apparatuses, the telephone is also strictly linked to the home, the woman's sphere under patriarchy.

Several notable texts present the telephone as literally a woman's lifeline. In Jean Cocteau's La Voix humane (first filmed in 1948 by Rossellini) and the film The Slender Thread (1965) the telephone is our means of access to the "star" and the purpose of the narrative is to ensure that she keeps talking—that is, stays alive. In both cases the women are suicidal, alienated, and isolated, and the telephone is their only means of making tenuous contact. Versions of Cocteau's drama strive to be faithful to their source by maintaining the single set and restricted point of view of this one-woman monologue as we watch the woman talk without our hearing the voice on the other end, but this is essentially theatrical and has nothing to do with the specific character of the voice on the radio or the telephone. By keeping voice and image synchronized, they lose the peculiar quality of the voice as disembodied, as alienated from the body, wandering, lost in the symbolic. Such a quality is preserved in The Slender Thread, where a woman calls a suicide prevention hotline. Her only chance of contact is through language and a machine. Each inadequate, together they form an illustration of what is killing her.^[10]

Culturally, the telephone has long been offered as a palliative to women. In a study of assumptions about women and telephones, Lana Rakow notes that "early commentar[ies] . . . extolled the virtue of the telephone in reducing women's loneliness." One author, she notes, "claims that by the end of the 1880's, 'telephones were beginning to save the sanity of remote farm wives by lessening their sense of isolation'" (Kramarae 1988, p. 207, quoting John Brooks).

In keeping with the exaggerated claims made for the telephone and aimed at women, a 1938 advertisement for Bell Telephone pictures a Lilliputian woman sitting on a giant telephone over the words, "Few things give you so much convenience, happiness and security—all rolled into one." The title crawl at the beginning of Sorry, Wrong Number modifies this optimism with the ubiquitous contemporary fear of crime:

In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives . . . It is the servant of our common needs—the confidante of our innermost secrets . . . life and happiness wait upon its ring . . . and horror . . . and loneliness . . . and . . . death!!!

To some extent the telephone empowers women, enabling them to combine their piecemeal knowledge and find out what is going on in the separate world

of men. In Sorry, Wrong Number, we see what amounts to a network of women using the telephone to talk behind men's backs: the secretary talks about her boss, and Sally about her husband, not to mention the rows of telephone operators making these connections possible.

Talking behind her husband's back becomes literal in the case of Sally Lord, an old friend of Leona's and ex-girlfriend of Henry's. She reads in the newspaper that her husband is investigating Henry, but when she asks him about it, he tells her to mind her own business (presumably his isn't hers). She sneaks into the other room to call Leona, then creates an excuse for leaving the house so that she can call Leona back from a pay phone. But no matter how much or little women know, they can only subvert (Sally's husband's plans) or disrupt (Leona interrupts Dr. Alexander's evening out and her father's philandering with her incessant calls). The women talk, but they can't do anything. Sally cannot stop her husband's investigation, and Leona cannot make Henry call her back.

Ultimately, the telephone is a sign of Leona's impotence. When she calls for a nurse because she is all alone in the house and frightened, no one will

come. When she calls the number left her by a man who knows something about Henry, she finds she is talking to the morgue. At the same time she is bombarded with incomprehensible information. Henry reassures her that she is safe because there is a telephone right by the bed; she says, "I've been prey to every kind of horrible call." By the time she understands what all the pieces mean, she is incapable of saving herself. As in The Lonely Villa (1909), the telephone is revealed to be an instrument that underscores helplessness instead of alleviating it.^[11]

The clash of genres, everything frilly and domestic in Leona's sphere compared to the heavy angles and foreboding shadows in Henry's, puts further pressure on the text. As in Mildred Pierce, Sorry, Wrong Number illustrates the necessary imbalance that results from trying to combine two antithetical genres, film noir and the woman's film. The strongest dissonance comes when women try, if only momentarily, to control visual point of view and the film's narration. As we have already seen in the earlier films, that very distortion forms the value of these tortured texts. "If female sexuality and female discourse are regarded as together posing the threat of disruption to the linear process of the classic narrative, then that threat must be recuperated or repressed if the story is to have any kind of 'satisfactory' resolution," Annette

Kuhn argues. "Repression of the discourse of the woman," she says, is achieved "by means of a cutting-off," limiting "female control over the film's enunciation" (Kuhn 1982, p. 104).

Doane argues that in the "paranoid gothic . . . there is a concerted effort to locate [the woman] as the subject of knowledge"—in direct contradiction of classical codes. This branch of the woman's film insists "on situating the woman as agent of the gaze, as investigator in charge of the epistemological trajectory of the text" (Doane 1987, p. 134). Although she is quite explicitly barred from control of the gaze because of Sorry, Wrong Number 's dependence on hearing and consequent virtual elimination of standard shot/reverse shot, Leona is able to control much of the narrative, the cuts determined by what she hears and not what she sees. It is this adherence to radio's different forms of address and different means of constituting the listener/subject that comprises the threat Leona poses toward classical cinema.

Radio dramas are based either on the listener overhearing (a position similar to that of the film viewer, who sees without being seen, or the playgoer, who watches the characters through an invisible "fourth wall") or on direct address (by announcers, narrators, and even characters). Orson Welles's radio broadcast "War of the Worlds" (1938) incorporates both forms, particularly direct address, whereas the original Sorry, Wrong Number sticks exclusively to a series of overheard conversations. The third-person form is less potentially disruptive when translated to film than direct address, and is in practice quite compatible with existing classical film structures. As used here, however, the dependence on overhearing, both by the viewer/auditor and characters within the narrative undermines the authority of the visual, resulting in a potentially subversive text.

Occupying the German expressionist/film noir crossroads favored by many European émigrés, such as the film's director, Anatole Litvak, Sorry, Wrong Number tells its story through an increasingly complicated flashback structure held together by voice-overs and the central organizing presence of the woman to whom the flashbacks are being narrated. The voices we hear and the stories they tell come to Leona (and us) over the telephone. The telephone conversations are presented by crosscutting between Leona and the caller on the other end. These in turn lead to flashbacks, signaled by a slow dissolve and a marked increase in the volume of the music, as either Leona or the speaker remembers or narrates previous events.

The use of voice-over narration with flashbacks is not in itself enough to distinguish the film from other films of the time. In fact, it is rather common in film noir, where it signals the fragmentation of the narrative. In the 1946 film The Killers, a film in many ways similar to Sorry, Wrong Number, the flashbacks are the story. However, in The Killers, directed by Litvak's fellow émigré Robert Siodmak (who also directed The Spiral Staircase ),^[12] the flashbacks assume the authority of an omniscient point of view. Although each major segment is initiated by a particular character, who verbally covers the

transitions from present to flashback, nothing within the flashbacks themselves marks them as being to any extent subjective or controlled in any way by the character. In Sorry, Wrong Number, as Leona grows more hysterical, the flashbacks and even the cuts to the caller become increasingly expressionistic, both visually and on the sound track. As the film progresses, there is a growing dissolution of any sense of reliable, objective visual information.

Of the six major flashbacks, Leona herself directly authorizes one. She calls Sally Hunt, whom we have seen Henry meet for lunch that day. Sally warns Leona that Henry might be in trouble, but she cannot say what kind of trouble and has to hang up. Leona, speaking to herself, repeats the name "Sally Hunt." This leads in standard form to a flashback (with minimal narration) showing how the rich and glamorous Leona Cotterill stole Sally's hardworking, poor but ambitious boyfriend, Henry. The flashback ends where it began, with Leona in bed, thinking. This is the only flashback that does not make extended use of voice-over, because it is not presented as a story Leona hears, but as something she remembers.

When Sally calls back, she tells Leona that her husband, who is with the district attorney's office, is investigating Henry. As we cut to Sally on the phone, we see a flashback detailing how Sally found out about her husband's work. Sally's story is presented in a strongly expressionistic way, oddly reminiscent of Susannah York's "dream" in Freud (1960). In voice-over, Sally says: "It was one of the weirdest days I've ever spent. . . . Parts [of Staten Island] seem to exist in a kind of dream, like the lonely beach we went to that day. It was quite a desolate place, Leona. Far out on the island."

They're on a beach, empty and cold, near a dilapidated, boarded-up house. Sally ducks behind a broken boat, watching her husband and his men. They hide in a nearby shack and watch the house. Nothing happens. After time drags on, she sees a signal from the house. A boat appears. A man with a briefcase steps out and walks into the deserted house. The men follow. Sally runs to a net-strewn stair to get a closer look. Her husband and his men leave, carrying the briefcase.

What is notably different about Sally's story are the strongly disturbing visuals, with their emphasis on diagonals and extreme angles, and the disjointed and incomplete nature of the information. Sally doesn't know a lot and is in constant danger of being discovered by her husband. Her fear seems to infest her perception: "I didn't know what I expected to see. As a matter of fact, there wasn't much I could see at first." As she is unaware of what anything means, it all becomes heavy with portent, resulting in the exaggerated images typical of classical "subjective" scenes such as dreams. Leona, our listener-surrogate, repeatedly asks what it can mean. As the central organizing "ear" for whom the story is being told, she knows as little of the significance of this striking scene as we or Sally do.

The third and most complicated structure occurs when Leona's doctor, treating her progressively worsening heart condition, tells her of a meeting he

had with Henry where the doctor revealed that Leona's condition was psychosomatic. As Dr. Alexander (Wendell Corey) narrates his flashback, set in his office, Henry begins to tell him how Leona's heart condition first began as a result of a conflict of wills between them. This triggers Henry's flashback within the doctor's flashback. Inside Henry's flashback, Henry comes across as a well-meaning and tender husband. The question, however, is whether or not this is Henry's view of himself, represented subjectively in his memory, or the doctor's view of Henry. The question of who is "authorizing" Henry's flashback leads to a third possibility—that we are seeing Leona's images. (She listens to the doctor and supplies images to both his story and his version of Henry's story.)

The accelerating expressionism of the visual design and in the foreboding music begins to put not only the control of the flashbacks in doubt, but the crosscutting as well. The reason crosscuts to the speaker work so well is because they fill the slot usually served by conventional shot/reverse shot, with the cut being signaled by the dialogue and not the look. When Leona receives the strangest call of the night from Waldo Evans—a man she does not know—the "reverse shot," the cut to identify the voice on the other end of the line, reveals nothing. As he speaks, we see a silhouette shot from a very low angle. Behind him is a dark room lit only by light coming through the transom. The only time we "see" Waldo Evans is in his heavily noir-ish account of his and Henry's black market drug dealings.

The (non)representation of Waldo Evans reenforces the possibility that we have never left Leona's room at all. Each cut to other characters is put in doubt retroactively, submitted to Leona's subjective, but authorial, auditory point of view. As the organizing subject, Leona supplies the faces that go with the voices she hears, the rooms they occupy, the clothes they're wearing (Sally's "poor but honest" milieu, Dr. Alexander's tuxedo and impatient wife, as well as the unidentifiable Mr. Evans). Some voices are never given faces at all (the operators or the hospital receptionist Leona asks to send a nurse). Their function is all we and Leona need to know. This is not to say that Leona imagines the entire movie. The voices are "real," the phone calls real (i.e., not under Leona's control). It is merely the images accompanying them that are called into question as objective visual representations of the voices we hear.

Listening to the radio or talking on the telephone thus become acts of reading, even more than watching films. Leona occupies and demonstrates the position of the radio listener, sitting in his or her home, overhearing others speaking yet unable to intervene or make herself heard. Unlike film viewers, the original radio audience would be doing the work Leona does here (through her control of the cinematic signifier), providing faces for the voices and filling in the image of the caller.

No one's images in the radio audience would be more correct that any one else's. In a film, though, the images tend to carry authorial weight. And at first, the crosscutting seems to present equally objective worlds outside

Leona's bedroom, balancing her growing hysteria. It is the authority of these cuts and of the flashbacks within them that are put into doubt by the obsessive return to Leona listening, asking what it means, and the breakdown of "objective" style as Leona struggles to make sense out of the words and voices pouring into her ear.

Depending on flashbacks and crosscutting to open out the original radio play results in a precarious instability of space and time that increases our dependence on Leona as the center of the narrative, the subject constituted as "the one who hears." Classical cinema's rules of spatial, temporal, and narrative continuity strive to ensure a text that seems transparent and unmediated, the story telling itself. Here, the narrative threatens to fly apart and requires an entire system of compensations to hold it together. In order to contain the potential spatial and temporal incoherence, the film constructs a "present" set in a coherent space: Leona in her bedroom from 9:30 to 11:15. Everything else is firmly tied to this, constantly referring back to it in order to preserve a sense of unity.

In radio drama, space and time are far more fluid by nature, program, advertising, and bracketing material all blending into each other, interruption and flow being characteristics of the medium. ("War of the Worlds" is the model textual restatement of the way the form functions.) The construction of space and time therefore requires less regulation than in the classical cinema text. In the original "Sorry, Wrong Number," the "present" is the half hour the program covers, as the narrative observes the dramatic unities, taking place entirely in the present as we listen in on Leona's telephone conversations. Spatially, to radio listeners eavesdropping with the help of radio/telephone technology, we are not so much in Leona's room as on the same line. The "where" is simply where we can hear her. When we no longer hear her, she ceases to exist.

The film maintains a sense of temporal continuity by (1) using voice-overs to make constant reference to the present and having characters address Leona ("Have you ever been to Staten Island, Leona?" Sally asks, over shots of a ferry approaching a dock); (2) employing deadlines in the present tense to give pressure to the scenes outside Leona's bedroom, which are themselves under time constraints (Sally's "five minutes are up" as she tries to speak to Leona, Henry stands in the train station with a clock saying 11:10 prominent behind him); and (3) quickly answering enigmas posed in the present in the flashbacks ("Sally . . . Hunt," Leona says, and we dissolve to a ballroom where Henry is dancing with a blonde, while Leona repeats "Sally Hunt" in voice-over).

Space is inevitably even more fragmented, hence the insistence on the technology of the phone system that links the scattered locations. The protocol of placing and receiving calls is stressed again and again. Operators ask standard questions, speakers repeat the numbers they want, callers ask first whether or not they have the right party. There are pay calls and person-to-person long

distance calls and over-the-phone telegram deliveries, and of course a wrong number which is in fact an inadvertently correct connection. In addition, voices are frequently "filtered" so that we hear them as if over a telephone, attesting to the literal connection of the far away with the speaker whom we see before us. Filtering usually occurs near the beginning or end of a conversation as a way of bringing our attention back to the technology.^[13]

Verbal transitions are also used. When Leona is talking to Henry's secretary, the secretary asks if Leona got the flowers. "I thought camellias might be nice this time." As she says "camellias," there is a dissolve to a close-up of an arrangement of blossoms and her voice switches to a filter, each marking the transition back to Leona's room. Cutting between speakers in the middle of a sentence eases the transition between physical spaces, while creating the sense of intimacy of a personal conversation, much like shot/reverse shot. Further, Sorry, Wrong Number literally softens the movement from space to space (and from time to time) with a heavy use of dissolves, implying the connection between spaces rather than the distance that separates them.

The more disjointed the spatial and temporal systems of the film become, and the more difficult it becomes to determine who "authorizes" the image as the scenes become progressively more subjective, the more heavily we depend on Leona as the subject, the point where all the pieces will be organized into meaning.

The challenge Leona poses to classical cinema is the elimination of "seeing/seen" and the substitution of "hearing/heard." Leona understands everything eventually strictly through what she's heard. If she makes seeing irrelevant, it becomes the job of the camera to render her hearing ineffectual—to place the ear at the mercy of the eye.

When Leona realizes what she has been hearing, it is presented in terms of an audio-montage. The killers have said that "the woman's" bedroom has a window overlooking the river. The servants are gone and her husband will be out. They will kill her when the train goes by because it will drown out her screams. After trying desperately to reach Henry and receiving calls from Sally and Waldo Evans implying Henry is in imminent danger of being arrested, Leona receives a call from Western Union. It is a telegram from Henry saying he won't be coming home because of business. As the train begins to rumble past her window, Leona clutches her forehead. Bits of conversations she has had during the evening echo on the sound track: the train, the location, her husband Henry's trouble with the law. She is at the center of it, the subject of all she has heard, the only place where all the pieces come together.

What Leona recognizes with such horror is the degree of hostility the world (and specifically Henry) holds toward her. The fact that she "accidentally" discovers this is significant: women are not supposed to know their exact place in the scheme of things—that is, that they are not subjects, but objects. Leona's "crime" lies in thinking she is a subject and in struggling to exert a degree of control over her own life. When she meets Henry, she is the

sexual exploiter, taking advantage of the well-built young man's poverty. Their marriage montage is dominated by Leona repeating in voice-over, "I, Leona, take thee, Henry." (The poster advertising the film reads, "Heiress to millions . . . who bought everything she wanted . . . including this man!")^[14] However, after they're married, Henry wants to decide where they will live and to support them on his salary. Leona, who had fought her father for the right to marry, to control her own money, and to decide where she will live, realizes that she is trapped, this time as Henry's wife (as opposed to Daddy's girl), and has a heart attack. She does not intentionally fake her illness according to the narrative ("the pain's real enough"), and from this point on her will to control her own life (and Henry's) is masked by an increasing physical deterioration.

As far as Henry is concerned, Leona's crime is turning out to have been strong all along. To Henry, Leona is a signifier of her father's wealth, a status symbol (the "Cough Drop Queen") with jewels and furs, a house, a job, and, finally, an insurance policy. Although Henry's flashback presents him as a considerate husband, he is nonetheless willing to bet that she'll be dead within the month, anticipating that her insurance will cover his debt to the mob. When Dr. Alexander tells him her heart is sound, Henry discovers that all the time he thought he was being strong for his fading clinging vine, he was actually performing in her scenario. Her strength is figured as being necessarily emasculating, making his superfluous, and interfering with his ability to function as a subject.

By pretending to a power intolerable to her husband, and furthermore by occupying the center of the narrative, through which all information must pass, Leona threatens to disrupt (if not supplant) the male hierarchy, especially that of the film noir world the male characters inhabit. This is why, like other strong women in the genre, she must be eliminated. (It is also possible that Leona has been using her illness to avoid maternity, the reluctance to become a mother a sign of the noir woman's refusal to take her rightful place in the family.)^[15]

In the radio play, Leona's "guilt" is moot. As a matter of fact, we can never really be certain that her husband was involved at all. We don't know him. In the original, "Mrs. Albert Stevenson" (she has no first name) gets a busy signal when trying to call her husband. She asks the operator to redial. The phone rings on the other end. A man answers. Mrs. Stevenson begins to speak, but simultaneously we hear another man speaking. One of the men seems to have a foreign (most probably German) accent, perhaps reflecting the drama's World War II provenance. The other sounds as though he's from Brooklyn. After trying to interrupt, Mrs. Stevenson is silent for the remainder of the conversation, until the men, about to specify the address, are abruptly cut off.

She calls the operator back, explaining the missed connection and demands

that the operator reconnect her with that wrong number. The operator tells her that is impossible, and Mrs. Stevenson tries the police. Again she tells about the wrong connection. This time, she is the one who mentions the similarity of her location and that described by the conspirators. "The coincidence is so horrible . . . I'd feel a lot better if you sent around a radio car." The policeman demurs that it is not likely that they were discussing her house, "unless you thought somebody was planning to kill you." She proclaims everyone's devotion to her "since I took sick twelve years ago." Hanging up, she begins to talk petulantly to herself: "Why doesn't Albert come home?" and "Oh, if I could only get out of this bed."

The phone rings. She answers. No one is on the line. She hangs up and it rings again. Again there is no one there. Getting more and more uneasy, she calls the operator, whom she accuses of being "spiteful." "I haven't had one bit of satisfaction out of one phone call this evening," she rages, and threatens to report the woman to her supervisor. The phone rings but she refuses to answer. "It's a trick," she says to herself. "I won't answer." When it stops ringing, she becomes frightened and demands that the operator get her the police. Their line is busy.

The phone rings and she grabs it, yelling. A man identifies himself as calling from Western Union. Her husband will be out of town. He had tried calling her, but her phone has been busy for the last half hour. In despair, Mrs. Stevenson calls the hospital and requests that a nurse be sent to spend the evening with her. They refuse because of a wartime shortage of nurses. Her clock has stopped, and she asks the time. It is 11:15.

The radio play is famous as an example of suspense. The anthology program that originally featured the drama was called "Suspense," and its weekly opening identification stated that the hope was "to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution until the last possible moment." The narrator continues, "And so it is with 'Sorry, Wrong Number,' and the performance of Agnes Moorehead. We again hope to keep you in . . . Suspense!"

However, the film's narrative is actually better constructed and more suspenseful than the original. Because the radio play depends on the dialogue, there is less emphasis on time, and consequently that device is not used. In the film, the camera frequently singles out a clock in Leona's bedroom at the beginning of a shot in order to keep us aware of time passing. Henry's impending arrest, though not specified to the minute as is Leona's impending murder, becomes an additional, interwoven time-constrained plot, increasing the suspense.

By "opening up" the story and defining the character of Leona's husband, the film provides a motivation for the murder that is missing in the original. In the radio version, we can never be sure whether or not Mrs. Stevenson's husband is involved. We do not know whether he is suffering business difficulties

or merely resents her; moreover, despite the length of her invalidism, there is indication that it is in any way ungenuine.

When a psychological background is provided for Henry, with his desire for financial independence and an explanation of Leona's illness added, the motivation for the murder becomes stronger, making it seem all the more inevitable. In the film, Leona becomes Oedipus, pursuing a mystery whose answer lies in her character and her past actions. Her blindness to the consequences of her obsession with controlling those around her leads inexorably to her fate. Henry's arrest in the last shot of the film smacks of Production Code retribution; in the original, all indications are that the cipheric Mr. Stevenson has gotten away with murder. On the other hand, the film's conclusion perfectly ties up the two lines of suspense, bringing all actions and their consequences full circle.

Leona's "will to power" extends beyond the psychology of the character within the narrative. As the "organizing ear," she poses a challenge to cinema's image-based construction, redefining the subject as the one who listens. In Mildred Pierce , another woman who has succeeded in asserting her independence, thus putting her "rightful" husband to shame, is silenced by the text's validation of the noir discourse, embodied by an omniscient policeman.^[16] At the end of the film, Mildred is (re)placed in her husband's custody. Leona cannot be handed over to her husband, as he has failed to control her to begin with and is being stripped of his power by the other males. Throughout the course of the film, Leona proves her prowess. She is able to decode the complicated series of events that make sense of an errant phone call merely by using the phone—by listening and speaking. In order to recuperate or destroy the speaking woman, the system must reassert the power of the image.

The scenes in Leona's bedroom are the center of the film. In the first scene in the film, Leona waits for her call to be answered. The camera follows her movements. She reaches for a cigarette, and the camera pans right, revealing a clock that says 9:30 and Leona and Henry's wedding portrait. She reaches for a tissue, and the camera pans left showing a table filled with medicines near a wheelchair. ("I'm an invalid, you know," she says to the operator.) However, after Leona hears the killers' conversation and calls the operator back, the camera begins to establish a certain distance from her point of view. As she begins to relate the story so far to a second operator, the filtered voice of the woman on the other end fades out, so that all we hear is Leona. The repetition of the plot makes it less important for us to attend to what she is saying, and the camera begins to investigate Leona's room. The camera pans toward the open window as the sound of a train gets louder, threatening to drown out Leona's voice. As the camera continues to pan around the room, our attention to what she is saying fades in and out, depending on occasional congruencies with what we see. When she says, "I'm all alone tonight," we see a nurse's coat and a hospital bed through the doorway. Dissolving to a shot outside on the landing, the camera cranes down the staircase and into the

kitchen, leaving the sound of Leona's voice farther behind. As it moves in for a medium shot of a servant's jacket hanging next to the downstairs phone extension, we hear Leona say, "There isn't a sound downstairs, not a sound." When we cut back to her, her eyes are cast down and she is concentrating on the telephone. No part of the shot was from her point of view.

Such salient camera movement does several things. First, it functions like a small descriptive paragraph, showing us the set in detail before handing over control of the narrative to Leona. (There is a similar examination of Jeff's apartment at the beginning of the equally set-bound Rear Window .) Second, the set establishes that we are, for the moment, in woman's film territory, with that genre's attention to domestic decor and a central female figure. Most important, though, as in Rear Window , the foregrounding of the enunciation with this early camera movement makes clear that there is a narrative presence separate from Leona, and further, that it is a strictly visual presence, unknown to her. The camera exposes the limits of Leona's strictly aural point of view, countering with a potentially dangerous visual point of view—dangerous because it is out of her (and our) control. Camera movement not motivated by Leona's look or her gestures continues throughout the scenes in the bedroom and shifts the position of the spectator/auditor from one of listening to/with Leona to one of watching her listen. The sense of threat posed by the untethered camera is borne out in the climax of the film, when the camera lets the killer in.

There are three major sequences not controlled by Leona's auditory point of view: the opening prologue, the entrance of the killer, and the end. Each of these sections is distinctly marked as narrated. Single long takes characterized by elaborate camera movement (tracks, dollies, crane shots) call attention to themselves and to the fact that they are not authorized by anyone in the text (i.e., Leona).

The prologue sports a long title roll delineating the wonders and potential horrors of AT&T. We see a cityscape at night. Dissolve to a shadow-filled office somewhere in the city. In the distance we hear a dial tone. To foreboding music, the camera pans to an office door, dollying dramatically up to the name "Henry Stevenson" written on the glass. With a dissolve, the camera passes through the door and up to a close-up of a telephone with the receiver off the hook. Dissolve to Leona in bed listening to a busy signal. She demands that the operator connect her with the number, not knowing what we know. It is this unanswered telephone that will set the entire plot in motion. The camera has already given us privileged information that sets us apart from Leona.

Later, knowing Henry is about to be arrested, Leona calls for a nurse to come stay with her. In the middle of her hysterical pleas for help, the camera indulges in a slow retreat, pulling back from the bed, dollying out the bedroom window, sinking two storeys past a tree to reveal a man's shadow against the house. A hand reaches in and opens the kitchen window the killers had said would be left unlocked. The extravagance of this gravity-defying move is

pointed: it is, in fact, the return of the repressed. After an hour and some minutes, the camera forcibly reestablishes the preeminence of the visual discourse over the heretofore verbally dominated narrative structure.

As we follow the killer moving through the kitchen toward the telephone extension, we cut to Leona, literally cut off in mid-speech.

Leona: What was that? . . . As if someone had lifted the receiver off the hook of the extension downstairs.

Operator (filtered): I didn't hear it, ma'am.

Leona: Well, I did. There's someone in this house. In the kitchen downstairs. And they're listening to me now—

She clasps her hand over her mouth and hangs up. Leona's technical knowledge and telephonic expertise (understanding the meaning of the quiet click and instantly making the correct deduction) do her no good at all. Her voice, the exclusive sign of her presence in the radio version and her sole connection to others, is denied her now and puts her in danger. When the phone rings immediately, she is afraid to pick it up, but must. It is Henry.

The competing discourses, the auditory identification with Leona versus the identification with the camera (linked to the killer), put the viewer in a bind. If we identify with Leona, our listener/surrogate, we identify with the victim. The establishment of an alternative identification with the camera allows us to escape at the cost of rejecting Leona and auditory identification in favor of classical cinema and the primacy of the image. Radio is put in its place, cinema triumphant.

By the time Henry calls, Leona's death is defined as a "mistake." The mobsters have been arrested, so they won't need to be paid off with Leona's insurance money. Henry does not want her killed, because it will send him to the chair. However, Leona's death serves a greater purpose—the reestablishment of the priority of the image.

Leona hears footsteps coming up the stairs. Henry tells her to walk to the window and scream, but she cannot pull herself out of bed. "He's here!" she tells Henry, staring at something beyond the camera. As noted earlier, the woman's look is insufficiently empowered to control the narrative in the "paranoid" woman's film, of which Sorry, Wrong Number could be a raucous prototype (see Doane 1987, pp. 123–54). As we have shown, Leona has been able to control much of the narrative through the acoustic. However, the woman's inability to "see" is powerfully reinstated at the film's climax.

In the last shot of the film, as the killer approaches her bed, there is no reverse shot as Leona screams. We see her staring wildly, but there is no reverse shot that would legitimate her fear. The horror of the unseen is a carryover from the radio play. However, a more compelling reason why we do not see the killer here is because what kills Leona in the film is not only invisible

but unvisualizable. It is the system itself—language, patriarchy, cinema—that needs to destroy her. As she pleads for her life, the camera pans to the window where the train passes, drowning out her screams as planned.

In the radio play, Leona is stabbed to death. We hear screams, coughing and hacking—shocking and violent effects that verge on the pornographic.^[17] In the film, Leona is more fittingly silenced. Her hands, gripping the edge of the nightstand, loosen and fall out of the frame. Music and sound effects (which are not inimical, merely subordinate, to the classical image-based system) overwhelm her ability to hear or make a significant sound. In a phone booth, Henry begs her to scream. When we return to her bed, she is gone, literally wiped out. (A character falling out of frame like this is called a "natural" wipe, as opposed to optical wipes, where the hand of the enunciator is present.)

To reiterate: "If female sexuality and female discourse are regarded as together posing the threat of disruption to the linear process of the classic narrative, then that threat must be recuperated or repressed if the story is to have any kind of 'satisfactory' resolution [or] closure" (Kuhn 1982, p. 104). Never a role model, Leona accepts the guilt for her actions and begs Henry's forgiveness, but it is too late for her to be recuperated. Having exposed the potential power of the woman's voice, the ability to gain knowledge despite both isolation and a culturally imposed passivity approaching paralysis, Leona has to be fully repressed for a "satisfactory" resolution.

In the silence of her room, the phone rings. The killer's gloved hand reaches in and gruffly answers, "Sorry. Wrong number." He hangs up, ending the conversation and the film.

In the films discussed above, the woman's voice does not free her; she is either reduced to silence (Alice and Leona) or gives up and echoes the words provided for her (Alicia and Helen). In each of the texts (except perhaps Blackmail ), there is no doubt that putting sound and the woman "in their place" is presented as a good thing, perpetuating cinematic and patriarchal hegemony. Nevertheless, for moments in each of these texts, Echo is presented as someone rendered mute. Helen can't speak; Alice does not know how to find the right words; Alicia's words are used against her, her active speech discounted and dismissed; Leona lives on the telephone—and dies. In Notorious , control of the technology is wielded within the text by the male character (and so, too, at the very end of Sorry, Wrong Number ). In Blackmail , Alice's silence is a function of language and film sound, both loaded and used against her. In The Spiral Staircase and Sorry, Wrong Number the image itself moves to aid the violent repression of the active woman who would speak. The challenge the woman's voice poses to the cinematic hierarchy and its representation of woman as object is met with the reassertion of the power of the image. Sound and the woman are contained, suppressed, in the revenge of classical cinema.

Rita Hayworth in  Miss Sadie Thompson