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Originally a radio play by Lucille Fletcher, this taut drama centres on a bedridden heiress who, left alone in her apartment, tries to call her husband and overhears her own murder being planned. Fletcher opened out the screenplay just enough to allow beefy Burt Lancaster to share a crumb of the honours with Barbara Stanwyck, and to heighten the claustrophobia of the victim's bedroom by contrasting it with a murky outside world. Anatole Litvak directed this classic film noir, a real nail-biter, which earned Stanwyck an Oscar-nomination for her tour de force as the domineering, neurotically ill Leona, at the mercy of her self-induced helplessness.

Stanwyck in one of her most famous roles, as an invalid who overhears a telephone conversation between conspiring... read more on Time Out