"Leona" (Barbara Stanwyck) is a wealthy bedridden woman who uses her telephone as a lifeline with an outside world which she has increasingly decided to shun. It's when making a call one evening that she overhears two men plotting a murder. Terrified, she tries to reach her husband "Henry" (Burt Lancaster) but he's nowhere to be found. She tries the police but what can she tell them? That is when she begins to try and rationalise what she has heard and for the next tautly directed and paced ninety minutes we begin to learn a little about her, her relationship with her husband and about his own activities with chemist "Evans" (Harold Vermilyea) and the mobster "Morano" (William Conrad). As the story unfolds so does the palpable sense of threat - but who is the target? Is there really a target at all or is she just a neurotic mess of a woman? Her constant and increasingly frenetic use of her telephone serves as an effective conduit for a series of flashbacks that assemble in an episodic, almost compartmentalised, fashion a psychological jigsaw puzzle that exposes something of this frankly quite unpleasant woman, her ambitious and frustrated husband and so go some way to explaining how she has ended up in bed in her townhouse all alone. Any assumptions we may make at the start are quickly disabused by a really strong effort from Stanwyck who manages to ensure we are more and more invested in the fate of her potential victim and dare I say, I even started to warm to the woman a little as the story progressed. Lancaster isn't so impressive, but he does enough and Franz Waxman's menacing score helps bring something of the Hitchcock to this darkly lit film noir that shows Stanwyck to be quite the star.
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