I was impressed that a movie made in 1948 still had such an impact on me, 60 years later.

The story centers around Barbara Stanwyck’s character, a rich invalid. She’s stuck at home one night, without her nurse, and her husband, played by Burt Lancaster, is late coming home. While trying to call his office, the phone lines cross, and she overhears two men plotting a murder.

This makes her incredibly uneasy, and makes her uneasy. She calls her husband’s secretary, who tells her about a woman who came to his office, then she calls the woman, then her doctor, then a man who works with her husband, growing more and more frantic with each phone call. Slowly she starts to piece together things about her husband that she never knew before.

You get more and more drawn in as the movie goes on. By the last five minutes, I was holding my breath and I had that tight little feeling in my stomach, not unlike the one I get when I’m on top of a hill on a roller coaster, about to rush down.

Sorry Wrong Number is everything a good suspense film should be. It builds up tension at a perfect pace and, at just the right second, the whole thing comes crashing down.