The New Pictures, Sep. 20, 1948

Sorry, Wrong Number (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is the screen version of a radio melodrama that made a pretty good name for itself and was repeated many times on the air (TIME, Sept. 10, 1945). A wealthy, neurotic invalid (Barbara Stanwyck) overhears a murder plot through a faulty telephone connection. She works at the phone trying to thwart the murderers, her frenzy growing by leaps & bounds as she begins to suspect that she is the intended victim.

The half-hour radio thriller became a sort of classic of its kind: using only the voice of the woman and the voices she hears on the phone, it made all its points by ear, piling up the suspense and horror with graphlike efficiency. The film, is less efficient. Radio Scripter Lucille Fletcher has had to fill out her original script, and too much of what she has added is mere stuffing. In the movie’s attempt to reconstruct the murder conspiracy as it grows out of the victim’s difficult relations with her husband (Burt Lancaster) and her father (Ed Begley), there are too many flashbacks inside of flashbacks.

Nonetheless, the picture survives its handicaps. It gives Barbara Stanwyck her fattest role since Double Indemnity, and she makes the most of the pampered, petulant, terrified leading character. But what really brings the film off is the skill with which Director Anatole Litvak handles the inflated plot. He knows how to tell a complicated story in a swift, simple way. He keeps his camera restlessly on the prowl, soaking up the creepy mood that surrounds a doomed woman, alone in an empty house at night. The result is a melodrama that knows where it’s going and gets there fairly fast, considering the load of baggage it has to carry.

Good Sam (RKO Radio), apparently a coy way of saying Good Samaritan, is a serio-comic cinemequivalent to Graham Greene’s tragic novel, The Heart of the Matter (TIME, Aug. 9). The hero in Greene’s novel is so obsessed by pity that, in his effort to avoid causing pain to others, he commits a number of deadly sins. In this movie, Sam (Gary Cooper) is just incurably kind; he is the world’s softest touch. His kindness does not funnel him into suicide and presumptive damnation, but it does bring him to the brink of Hollywood’s grimmest disasters: financial ruin and the breakup of his marriage (with Ann Sheridan).

Gary Cooper is probably better qualified than most Hollywood leading men to suggest a nice guy who cannot say no. Until he comes to share, with the picture as a whole, its air of haggard and ill-concealed desperation, he does a beautiful job. Ann Sheridan seems to have a good time as a sour-tongued helpmeet. Most of Sam’s beneficiaries (Matt Moore, Clinton Sundberg, Todd Karns, et al.) perform with verve, and for the first hour or so Producer-Director Leo McCarey and his scripters do some skillful knifework on the various kinds of ingrates who can always be counted on to slake the savor out of the salt of the earth.

When it is about half over, the picture begins to get elaborate and tired. One can only guess why; but it looks as if McCarey & Co. began to suffer because the exigencies of producing a comedy for mass entertainment forced them to turn the truth into a lie. The truth is that Sam’s kind of virtue is nearly always its own reward, and nearly always a very bitter reward into the bargain. For a while the picture shows a fine, fresh grasp of such facts. But when Hollywood tackles a big Christian theme, the lie seldom fails to win out. In this case, the audience is told that Kindness Pays, in good hard cash—or, in one of the picture’s more arresting lines, “There’s profit in people.” Good Sam has the good grace to go to pieces, as it prepares to tell this whopper.