“...a masterpiece of technical bravura. In Lucille Fletcher's story of a woman who overhears a plan to kill her on the telephone, a powerful sense of imprisonment is built up: the bedridden hypochondriac in her lace in a Sutton Place mansion, the elevated clattering across a bridge seen through the windows; the camera circling and re-circling the room from dressing-table to chair to bed; and finally the shadow of the killer on the stairs, a leather gloved hand coldly replacing the receiver; here, and in the handling of the impersonal voices on the phone, the direction is masterly. And outside the confined action of the room, the film never falters either; a visit to Staten Island, a boy digging clams, a house that is the only one left in a long-vanished street; a frantic telephone conversation over the sound of a subway train on a platform at night. Barbara Stanwyck as the victim, Burt Lancaster as her murderous husband, Ann Richards as the one true friend; these are figures very much in the round.”