The “Full Cast and Crew”hosted by Jason Cilo is among my favorite podcasts about films. The October 12th edition focused on the roles of telephones in movies was fascinating.
Scores of scenes and plot devices immediately came to mind, a number of which Cilo covered. Some are one-sided phone calls, which comedian Bob Newhart popularized in his stand-up skits, while others are two-way calls in which the viewer hears both sides of the conversation.
The phone was an essential tool of Woodruff and Bernstein’s journalism in “All the President’s Men” (1976). Redford and Hoffman used their phones to drive the plot and heighten tension.
Cilo didn’t mention “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), but Redford’s knowledge of phone technology was a key plot device.
The phone was obviously central to Grace Kelly’s attempted murder in Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder” (1954).
Among the seemingly endless number of movies with significant phone-driven plots and scenes are Call Northside 777, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Dr. Strangelove, Fargo, Heat, Jerry Maguire, Lost Highway, No Country for Old Men, Pillow Talk, Sorry Wrong Number, Taken, Telefon, The Big Lebowski, The Conversation, The Departed, The Silence of the Lambs, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Verdict and, well, the list goes on.
Cilo did not cover the horror genre, thankfully, where creepy calls to young female victims are routine and entirely too misogynistic.
Oh, excuse me, gotta go. The phone is ringing.
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