GB
1959
1hr
Dir: Vernon Sewell
Starring: Peter Elliott and Olive Sloane
A telephone number dialled in error proves the downfall of a ruthless criminal gang
This short but gripping Merton Park crime thriller is carried through to its inevitable conclusion by a wonderful character performance from Olive Sloane, it was her that dialled the ‘Wrong Number’. The film has some opening shots of a train journey, depicted with the now ubiquitous stock shots of expresses passing through Carnforth in the dark, as taken from the original Brief Encounter from 1948 (qv). This film uses two of these stock shots, a streamlined Stanier ‘Coronation’ (the last one of which ran with its air-smoothed casing in 1949) followed by a ‘Royal Scot’ Class but, interestingly, it shows the whole complete shots of these trains filmed for David Lean’s classic, which are somewhat edited in Brief Encounter. There is an additional stock shot of a streamlined Bulleid pacific, seen originally in Noose for a Lady (1953), and a very unusual view from atop a locomotive boiler!!
