An example of Anatole Litvak at the peak of his mastery, this angst-ridden and macabre film noir is about a psychosomatic invalid Leona (Barbara Stanwyck in a defining role) who one evening discovers by accident she is about to be murdered that very night. Her only weapon is a white telephone next to her bed. Lucille Fletcher wrote the script based on her hit radio play (“The greatest single radio script ever written,” according to Orson Welles). The film adaptation was far more complex as it comprised ten flashbacks, two of them containing another embedded flashback, twelve in total. The flashbacks relay information about Leona’s troublingly oedipal relationship with her father (built chillingly into the mise-en-scène) and her possessiveness over her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), lured into her life by the promise of wealth and position. Because these flashbacks are not in chronological order, they function more like the dispersed thoughts of a paralysed and hysterical woman.
Litvak loaded the film with splendid details (a policeman too busy attending to a small black girl to take Leona’s call seriously) and an inexplicably dreamy quality. He takes perverse pleasure in giving us terrifying power: we see the things that the bed-ridden Leona can’t see. We are a step ahead of her and that make us accomplices in a sinister game. When a nervous Burt Lancaster spots a man he thinks is spying on him in a restaurant, the white-haired man in dark glasses with a bow tie is actually Anatole Litvak in a rare cameo, taking part in the game. In line with Litvak’s ongoing fascination with vulnerable women on the edge of nervous breakdown (applied in turn to Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Deborah Kerr, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren and Samantha Eggar), it’s a terrifying film, both in its subject-matter and in Litvak’s cold, precise treatment of it. His mirror shots distort forebodingly. His signature dolly shots that once were filled with dancing people and the smoking chimneys of lively cities now creep through dark, empty hallways and staircases that resemble a gas chamber. He witnessed hell during the war and now hell had entered the home.

Ehsan Khoshbakht